will carry everything you need to get started on a variety of home self-sufficiency projects, like growing and preserving your own food, making cheese, keeping chickens, or making soap!
And bokashi too! Here is owner Rick Havlak with our bokashi buckets and bokashi.
In this article from the Kamloops Daily News, Deanna Hurstfield is looking to start a bokashi composting network where she lives. It has a good overview of the process.
I need to respond to these lines in the article:
Bokashi seems to offer many advantages, Hurstfield said. The catch? It’s not cheap.
There are bokashi kits available through Internet dealers, she said. The costs of those systems appear to run at about $20 to $30 a month for all the supplies, substrates and microbe mixes.
Here are the costs for the first year of bokashi composting using my system:
Two bokashi buckets:
$85
4 x 1Kg Bokashi*:
$30
Total
$115
Monthly cost:
$9.58
*[two 1Kg bags are included with the bokashi kits]
In the second year or, if you have your own buckets as Deanna does, all you need is the bokashi: $60
Monthly cost: $5
I’ve been generous on the amount of bokashi you need for a year. Although I say that a 1Kg bag of bokashi will last 2 – 4 months, I’ve had customers come back for a second bag after 6 or 9 months, even a year later. Recently, a small office re-ordered a bag of bokashi nearly two an a half years after their first purchase!
While my competitor’s prices probably do come close the article’s monthly estimate for the first year, the cost in the second year is much lower.
"If we can find a microbiologist who can help us figure out what is in there, we can cut the costs even more," she said.
I have neverhidden how to make your ownbokashi which will lower your costs even more. I only ask that you buy the Terra Biosa Friendly Microbes [aka EM] from me.:-)
We have decided to start an office composting system. We only have 13 employees so we aren’t generating a large amount of waste, but we still think we should try and cut down. Our first idea was to have a company come in and pick up our compostable materials, but after some searching we found that Vancouver doesn’t currently have this system in place. Smithrite offers this, but not for offices as small as ours. We then thought about setting up a worm bin, but from our research we think that this method can be smelly and there are a lot of materials that have to be kept out.
Then we found the “Bokashi Bucket”. It was appealing to us because it claims to have no smell, no worms, recycles all types of waste other than liquids and is small enough for in the office kitchen.
The post includes a link to my website and updates have already been posted
When I talk with people about Bokashi, I give them this brochure [.pdf]
Note: The image presented by Shared Vision is only one bucket. All my client photos show that two nesting buckets are used. The inside bucket has drainage holes and the outside bucket [the one with the label] is used to collect liquid from your material.
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This is a sticky post and will be featured as the most recent entry for the next few weeks. Current content below this one.
Melor binti Mohd Daud from Perak, Malaysia started a blog – Bokashi Farmer – on WordPress and links to this blog, Susan‘s article about me on her own blog and an article on Path to Freedom that I commented on a while back.
As I mentioned last week, a guerrilla gardening group recently formed in Vancouver. We met last weekend, and I’ve been thinking about how to introduce the group to Heavy Petal readers. You see, there are just so many cool people involved! It’s inspiring and exciting.
First, there’s our founder and fearless leader, Oren, a landscape architect with a focus on urban ecological design.
There’s Al, who some of you might know from his blog Urban Wilderness but who is now blogging from Al’s Bokashi Blog about Bokashi composting (Al, I must find out more about this!).
There’s Ward, the “boy” behind cityfarmboy.com, a company promoting urban farming and related products and services.
Vertical Veg supports food growing in containers and tiny spaces: ideas, inspiration and practical advice.
If you want to grow food successfully in containers, nurturing soil life can make a huge difference. Worm compost, for example, is full of microbes and life. Add it to your containers and you will get more vigorous growth, and far fewer pest and disease problems. Discovering this, was the biggest turning point in my growing (more important, even, than self watering containers), transforming sporadic successes into something more consistent.
Why is soil life important?
Healthy organic soil in the natural world supports a web of life including bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes as well as larger creatures like worms and slugs. These organisms play a vital role in the life of plants. They break down organic matter to make the nutrients available for plant roots. They condition the soil and create air spaces and tunnels in it – improving aeration and drainage. And they compete with other more harmful organisms in the soil, ones that will damage your plants if left unchecked.
Soil life is complex – so the above is just my attempt to summarise some of the main benefits you can expect when you add life to your containers!
Why do you need to add life to containers?
Most commercial composts that we buy are sterilised and low in microbial life. So is municipal compost (it has to be made at hot temperatures to kill pathogens, killing much of the beneficial life, too). So if you want life in your containers – and to mimic soil in the natural world – you need to add it.
1. Worm compost
2. Homemade compost
3. Leaf mould
4. Manure
5. Bokashi
Bokashi is Japanese method of composting food quickly in a tightly sealed bucket. Benefits of bokashi are that you can add almost any food (even meat), it works quickly, can be done in a very small space, and doesn’t smell (much). The drawbacks are that you need to buy bokashi bran for it to work, and the pickled product is not as versatile as worm compost. But you can add it to the bottom of containers to add both organic matter and microorganisms.
Mix about 10 – 20% into the compost in the bottom third of a container.
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