The Bokashi Bucket

This is a compost bucket that you can keep indoors and that you don't empty every day.  You fill it up over quite a few weeks, so there is no need to have a seperate compost bin or pile for food scraps outdoors.  You may want an outdoor compost pile for creating compost from lawn clippings, straw, manure, etc, but you wont need one for food scraps.

The Bokashi Bucket is quite big, but would sit in a cupboard under the sink or similar.  You could even keep it at your back door.  Absolutely any food can go into it – even meat, citrus peel and onions!  It doesn’t have any smell at all that I can detect (unless you leave the lid off), and it has an airtight lid. 

At the end of each day that you’ve used it, you give it a little sprinkle with some “bokashi”, which is a fermented grain, and you squash it all down with a potato masher.  You don’t empty it. 

Most families fill one in 4 weeks, at which time you just put it straight out into the garden.  You can bury it or add it to a compost pile.

At this stage, you can still see all the shapes of the food, but because of the fermentation process that they’ve gone through, the food now breaks down extremely quickly.  It also retains more nutrients than the traditional composting method, so more goes back into your garden.

As a bonus, while you are filling it some liquid drains to the bottom of the bin.  Every few days you can turn the little tap and drain this out into a tiny cup.  Dilute it in a watering can and use it on your plants as it is a concentrated fertiliser.

Why do I love it? 

·        I don’t have to empty my compost buckets outside every day.

·        My dog doesn’t get to the food scraps (he digs under my traditional outdoor plastic compost bin and scatters food all around the yard).

·        You don’t attract rats and mice as you do with an outdoor compost bin.

·        I can use it for onion skins and citrus peel that can’t go into a normal compost system (these can take for ever to break down in the outdoor compost – perhaps a year or more just guessing from my experience but with this system they break down in 2 to 3 weeks, perhaps 4 for really tough stuff).

·        If I ate meat, I would also love it ‘cause you can put meat scraps in too.

·        I don’t have a food scraps spot outside now – just food that goes to chooks, dog or worms – everything else goes in this bin.