Best Practices Bokashi

It is time that we started a massive re-training on bokashi composting.  We have learned a lot over the last months and I want to thank all of you who have contributed.

Despite what we may all have started out with, I want you to take the following ideas now to the core of how you think of the bokashi bin:

• Think of a bokashi bin as your stomach:  The better you chew things, the better the stomach digests. Reducing the size of your food scraps dramatically improves their fermentation in the bokashi bin. 
• The better we reduce the size of the food scraps, the more tea we capture through the bottom. 
• When air pockets trapped in your stomach or intestines come out, nobody wants to be around.  The same holds true for air pockets in your bokashi bin.  If you eliminate the air pockets, you dramatically reduce foul odors. 
• Let the bokashi bin drain into a larger pail for 30 minutes, even 120 minutes (with a much larger pail).  You will be amazed at how much liquid will come out, but at an incredibly slow rate.  Don’t be surprised if you get close to 1 gallon of tea the first time you try this with a bin more than 50% full. 
• Re-engineer the way food scraps are handled in your kitchen.  Re-engineering means changing the way the total processing of your food scraps is handled. At my house, we use a second jar for our blender to collect all food scraps. When the jar is close to full we add 1-2 cups of water and reduce everything to mush, using about 10 seconds of electricity.  Combined with the fermentation of bokashi, this material dissolves super fast in the compost bin or soil (i.e. 1 to 2 weeks).
• If you live in an arid or dry climate, you should be seriously considering Bokashi composting.  Please check out the chart above.