vgnwtch (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} vgnwtch) wrote in ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} daily_granola,@ 2008-04-15 11:10:00 |
|
Stating The Obvious
We stumbled across the term “bokashi” and wondered what it was. Turns out that there are loads of websites about it. It’s a Japanese composting method used in cities for 20-odd years. You put all your food and paper/cardboard scraps into a small bin (this one’s 18 litres, but you can get them much smaller) with a tap on the bottom for draining off liquid to feed your plants with. So far, so ordinary. But you can put anything in - meat, dairy, cooked foods - which makes it rather different than ordinary composting. The secret is the bokashi bran, a mixture of bran, sawdust, and microbes (yeast and fungi) that cause the material to ferment. The resulting mixture can be used by digging it into soil (including potted plants) or adding it to the compost heap. The bokashi mixture doesn’t look particularly decomposed, but once it’s in soil or compost, it rots very quickly indeed; when you add it to your compost, it raises the temperature of the heap, forcing all the compost to rot down far more rapidly than normal. For an initial outlay of about £30 (£25 for two bins + £5 for 3 month’s supply of bokashi bran), or for the much cheaper price of a beer fermenting bucket or a bucket with a tight lid, drilling a hole, and adding a tap to it, it looks like a good long-term investment, allowing us to compost even cooked scraps. For those who eat animal products, it’s even more valuable, allowing you to compost them instead of chucking them into landfill. There are YouTube videos explaining how bokashi works, which are pretty interesting. We may well treat ourselves, and by extension, the rest of the world.
We stumbled across the term “bokashi” and wondered what it was. Turns out that there are loads of websites about it. It’s a Japanese composting method used in cities for 20-odd years. You put all your food and paper/cardboard scraps into a small bin (this one’s 18 litres, but you can get them much smaller) with a tap on the bottom for draining off liquid to feed your plants with. So far, so ordinary. But you can put anything in - meat, dairy, cooked foods - which makes it rather different than ordinary composting. The secret is the bokashi bran, a mixture of bran, sawdust, and microbes (yeast and fungi) that cause the material to ferment. The resulting mixture can be used by digging it into soil (including potted plants) or adding it to the compost heap. The bokashi mixture doesn’t look particularly decomposed, but once it’s in soil or compost, it rots very quickly indeed; when you add it to your compost, it raises the temperature of the heap, forcing all the compost to rot down far more rapidly than normal. For an initial outlay of about £30 (£25 for two bins + £5 for 3 month’s supply of bokashi bran), or for the much cheaper price of a beer fermenting bucket or a bucket with a tight lid, drilling a hole, and adding a tap to it, it looks like a good long-term investment, allowing us to compost even cooked scraps. For those who eat animal products, it’s even more valuable, allowing you to compost them instead of chucking them into landfill. There are YouTube videos explaining how bokashi works, which are pretty interesting. We may well treat ourselves, and by extension, the rest of the world.
