As a single person, I don’t generate a lot of compostable material, mostly coffee grounds and fruit & vegetable peels. I tried setting up a rotating barrel composter, but I couldn’t keep it going. I don’t think I added enough material or kept it wet enough – the black barrel in the California 100+ deg heat drove off all the moisture. All I ever got was some mold, a bunch of fruit flies, and hundreds of undigested coffee filters.
I saw an ad for a “bokashi” composting system, which sounded like just what I need. It’s a Japanese method of anaerobically fermenting kitchen waste with a microbe-infused bran. (https://bokashicycle.com/how-it-works/). Within a few weeks you are supposed to get compost and “compost tea” for your houseplants. I’ve set it up on the back porch.
Have any of you Dopers tried this system? I am most concerned about the big pieces, like pineapple rinds and the indestructible coffee filters. Apparently to get optimum results a lot of bokashi users grind the garbage in a blender. Ugh. Not gonna happen!
My parents, who were first-class gardeners, just buried their food waste in a trench next to the garden plot, let it sit for a month or so, & then dug up the compost. No grinding, no fussing – we did live in the Midwest with wonderful black, rich soil though. In my yard I have dry “sandy loam” interlaced with big tree roots that make it tough to dig.
I’ve found that anything other than the most “lazy” composting like your parents did, isn’t worth the trouble. It’s always fiddly and it’s always nasty.
I’d bet your problem with your rotating barrel was that you didn’t have enough “brown” stuff, meaning basically dry cellulosic type waste. Dead dry leaves, newspaper, and stuff like that. You’re supposed to have a ratio of 2:1 or 3:1 brown to green, where “green” is stuff like coffee grounds/filters, wet grass clippings, most kitchen waste, etc…
I always had the problem that since we cook a lot, and we cook a lot of vegetables/eat a lot of fruit, we always had a whole bunch of green stuff, and depending on the season, didn’t have enough leaves or whatever brown stuff to adjust the ratio appropriately. Shredded newspapers do the trick, but you’ve got to shred them, and there are also concerns about the paper and ink itself.
at eat them.
Yes, I suspected that as well. My trees are almost all evergreens and I don’t think redwood branches count as “brown” material - plus they are as resistant to breaking down as coffee filters. And who has newspapers any more?
I’m with you: I don’t want to be intimate with my garbage. If the bokashi ends up being too much trouble, I am just going to start putting it in the city green waste bin.
You’re welcome. The only successful composter I know is my MIL, who has an enormous yard, and in the furthest back reaches of the yard, has a huge heap of composting stuff. She just tosses the kitchen fruit/veg scraps/coffee grounds and yard waste on there and lets it do its thing, and then shovels out from under as needed. Seems to work- she’s got a gorgeous, landscaping magazine quality yard.
Not having enough newspapers was a problem actually- we only get it 3 days a week, and only because we still get the actual paper because of the coupons/ads.
You might also consider indoor vermicomposting with earthworms in a controlled environment (a big Rubbermaid tote). It tends to go faster and is less stinky than the barrels since the worms preprocess the food scraps into worm poop, which is one step closer to soil.
They also make electric composters that just throw energy at the problem, heating and dehydrating your scraps. See FoodCycler® Eco 5™ | FoodCycler or various copycats.
But yeah… if you don’t really need the soil amendments, just letting your city do it is both easier and more efficient. Composting is not just a matter of technique but also scale; it just works better when you have a big mountain of material that generates more heat and biological activity than you can get at home. The municipal compost yard is a thriving jungle of life; your dinky little barrel at home is usually a sad little cage with lonely microbes.
I got sticker shock buying the bokashi setup (about $130)! For $450, I could eat out and let the restaurant take care of the garbage.
But I suspect that you are right, the bottom line is that you have to have a sustainable waste stream. From skimming through the on-line posts about bokashi systems, the most successful and ardent supporters seem to be commercial growers who have access to brewery waste to inoculate the mixture. They can then use the fertilizer they generate on their crops or bag it & sell it.
It just requires a lot of inputs in all the right proportions, adjusted for climate and weather, and manual effort once in a while. It’s possible to get home composting of various sorts to work, it’s just not trivial… at least not for those of us with black thumbs.
When the city composts it, your household waste is like maybe a tenth of a tenth of a percent of their processing volume. Their mountain of microbes is mature and self sustaining and adding your little scraps to the heap just feeds the happy, hungry horde.
At home, at low volume, you’re constantly juggling all the variables and trying to jumpstart and restart the biochemical reactions. Every ratio thus becomes much more important as a proportion of the smaller whole.
Don’t get me wrong, I really admire the people who can compost well, I’m just not one of them. And if your city already does it (which is relatively uncommon in my experience… lucky you!), might as well take advantage of it?
I do much the same as your MIL and it works fine. (Mind you, here in England things drying out is less of a problem.)
I run five composters, four regular ones and a “million year composter”. All veg waste, grass cuttings, dead leaves, plant remains from food production goes into them. If it looks like something will take a million years to compost, well there’s a bin for that.
Almost no thought goes into it. I have an allotment for growing vegetables and I’m pretty much self sufficient in compost.
So it can be done, but I’m sure scale is important; and I would guess that climate is a factor.
My MIL’s pile is an oval shape about 10’ x 8’, and about 3-4 feet high. So she’s starting to get the scale benefits I suspect.
It’s certainly a thriving ecosystem of sorts; we set up a cellular trail camera pointed at it a few years ago, and we’ve seen possums, raccoons, foxes, armadillos, skunks, squirrels, cats, and a couple times, ringtailed cats.. They come by to dine on the bugs that live in the compost pile. Pretty good wildlife diversity for a backyard in south central Austin!
It’ is emphatically not composting. It is pre-composting, it goes either into a pile or tumbler after, or gets buried in soil to enrich it (“soil factory”). Either in ground or in a container, about 1/3 dirt, 1/3 bokashi scraps, 1/3 dirt. It allows the compost stage to usually go quicker, and possibly aids in hot compost though that still takes maintenance. I primarily do it so I don’t have to walk out to my compost pile daily, especially if it’s frozen over in winter.
I put almost everything in: meat scraps, bones, pineapples and corn cobs and avocado pits, coffee grounds, all that. I also don’t see the effort in blending, no thanks. IMHO “bokashi tea” is a little overblown, in my dabbling I haven’t noticed it having a positive effect on the garden, and takes more effort than I have sometimes, so I just dump it down the drain or on the pile.
You do not need to buy much of anything. I make my own bran (this video is good for instructions, but you can skip the rice and milk steps if you have a source of microbes like kefir or yogurt). Then get 1-2 5 gallon buckets for $0-$10, drill holes in one if you want for the tea drainage and use it as an inner bucket. Some people do a 1-bucket setup though. The only purchase I’d recommend is $6 for a gamma seal lid at Home Depot.
Thank you @thelurkinghorror! This is very helpful. After I abandoned my tumbler I started dumping the food waste in a pile by the back fence. After about 6 months, I went out and raked the pile. Everything was pretty much just dessicated and mummified except the pineapple rinds, which had disappeared. But probably not coincidentally the squirrels look much fatter and sleeker lately. I raked everything up again, doused it with water, and covered it with a tarp. I hope that helps.
So it sounds like I will have to keep the damn pile going even with my bokashi bucket.
I was considering buying another kit so I could stagger 2 buckets, so thanks for pointing out that I don’t have to be so high tech!
I’m going to give it a fair try for a while, but it just sems like a lot of fooling around for the modest waste stream I generate. The municipal waste pickup alternative is starting to sound mighty attractive.
Unfortunately, bokashi is 9/10ths hoodoo and the remaining 1/10th just isn’t good enough to make it worth it. (Bokashi tea appears to be mildly toxic to plants and should be avoided.)
Our city collects compostable products and delivers it to a facility where it’s “speed” composted through the heat of sheer mass and, I believe, oxygen bubblers that help the microbes to destroy it. I think it still takes a few months or years to break down sufficiently to actually be used by plants as nourishment, though. They’ll give you fresh, finished compost for free.
While ours is run by the city, I believe that you can join co-ops and groups that will do this.
We put our food waste into a compostable bag on the kitchen counter and take it out to the trash about every day or two, before anything starts to smell.
I looked at some of the worm options, bokashi, those chop-and-dry systems, etc. and determined that it just wasn’t worth it for anyone that’s not a farmer with generous amounts of land to spare on composting piles.
If you’re real gung-ho to do it yourself, I’d probably recommend the worm bucket tower option:
But based on 1) the sheer amount of food waste that our two-person family generates, and 2) the visuals when you go in to clean and organize (see YouTube), I don’t personally find it to be very practical. I think all of these buckets and the roller barrels are just proofs of concept. At the size they’d need to be, to hold all the sludge you make, they’d simply be too large to work comfortably. Their only use is to demonstrate the principal to kids.
Yeah, I got one kit initially (SCD Probiotics) but now have 2 double bucket setups for rotation in addition to that. The buckets are bigger and therefore last longer, but the drained tea is nastier than the dedicated bucket and you need to be more diligent at dumping it.
Sage_Rat, it’s worth it for me because of the aforementioned having to go to a pile in winter when I can just open the bucket under my sink and dump it in. Less worry about critters getting into it, and it doesn’t stink if you do it right. My pile doesn’t often get hot but I do try to supply a mix of greens and browns. I don’t have city compost (Waste Management) so that’s off the table, and the companies that do compost exchanges seem expensive.
The tea is supposed to be heavily diluted, but mostly I just dump it on the pile and I figure that will help some microbe introduction, or at least won’t hurt. From what I understand it does have a good deal of nutrients, but what it doesn’t have is nitrogen, so it won’t replace that fertilizer. I’ve tried to put it in a hose mixer sprayer, but it tends to clog it up and I don’t really want to bother with filtering. Basically bokashi works well with my laziness/too many other yard and house things to do. I agree that there’s some magical thinking among people when they discover it, but perhaps not as bad as the JADAM/Korean gardening crowd.
The nutrient value is pretty well near zero. It also contains alcohol, since you’re basically making beer, and high levels of sodium and chloride, both of which are toxic to both plants and microbes. The alcohol is also toxic to both plants and microbes.
At the point where you’ve diluted it enough to deal with that, you’re basically just watering your plants.
Out in nature, rain water takes the waste products of bacterial feeding, and washes it away. In a sealed container, you’re just creating fermented dirt. Fermentation is a method of preservation because it inhibits growth.
I have a commercial barrel-type composter to which I add ailing and dead potted plants and old potting soil. Kept moist enough, that breaks down into decent compost eventually.
These days I mostly just toss the stuff onto the vegetable patch in fall along with degenerating un-harvested veggies, let it rot over the winter and till it into the soil in spring. I don’t try to compost food waste as I don’t want to attract a bunch of toothed wild creatures.
Sorry, what? This is lactofermentation, the byproduct is lactic acid mainly. Some of these make very low levels of alcohol, e.g. kumis, but that’s a SCOBY, i.e. bacteria and yeast vs. just bacteria. Alcohol is also produced with sugars, and while the LAB thrive on sugar, you don’t need to add any to your bucket.
I had a feeling like there was probably other more plentiful waste compounds being created but they weren’t coming to mind. You’re right that this is more like pickling than brewing.
But yeah, lactic acid is also a preservative because it’s a waste product of these sorts of processes.
A jar of pickles does have nutrients but pickle juice wouldn’t be my first pick to promote bacterial growth.
