Product Review: Bokashi Indoor Composting

First off, what is Bokashi? From Wikipedia:

“Bokashi is a method that uses a mix of microorganisms to cover food waste to decrease smell. It derives from the practice of Japanese farmers centuries ago of covering food waste with rich, local soil that contained the microorganisms that would ferment the waste. After a few weeks, they would bury the waste that weeks later, would become soil.”

Sounds promising. As I said in my first post about it, here, I was at Park + Vine when I saw an indoor composter on sale. At the time composting was not something we could really do. We live in an attached townhouse and the neighbors would frown if we started dumping food out back by our and their house. We could do little things like throw stale bread out to birds, or make it into croutons. So I was intrigued.

They were selling an All Seasons Indoor Composting Kit. It was basically a five gallon bucket with an air tight lid on top, a spigot near the bottom, and a screen above the spigot on the inside to keep solids from getting caught in the spigot. There was also a bag of Bokashi inside.

How it worked was easy. Put the screen in (it only fits one way). Sprinkle a bit of bokashi on it. And then add food scraps adding some bokashi each time. Simple enough.

Let’s clear up a bit of confusion here. If you think using this thing properly will make compost in a bucket you are mistaken, as I was. What this does is store up the food scraps and lets me start the compost process. After a few days you’ll start to smell a pickling smell and you’ll see white mold growing on the food (only if the lid is off). Every few days you should drain out the “tea” it makes through the spigot. You can use this to water plants just make sure you water it down first. Once it gets full transfer the contents to a five-gallon bucket with a tight fitting lid. Let it sit in the five-gallon bucket for two weeks while you are filling up the composter again and then bury it or add it to a compost pile.

I buried mine in a compost pile at my father’s house. Not too deep, I wanted to be able to check on it. Three weeks later all the gross looking stuff was gone:

So far I’ve made 15 gallons of compost and I’ve used a bag and a quarter of bokashi. I do add dairy and meat sometimes and I add more bokashi when I do this.

Final thoughts:

If you live in a place where you can’t have an outdoor compost pile this thing is great. There is no smell unless you have the lid open, which you will when you fill it. The bokashi lasts a long time. The food scraps turn to compost quickly once they are buried. So this is more for the condo, apartment, or townhouse dweller. If you can have a compost pile you may only use this guy in the winter. And as a side note, the “tea” that comes out works as really great plant food.

I highly recommend this to anyone who doesn’t have access to a compost pile, but keep in mind you do have to find a place to put it when you are finished.