A former food tech teacher, Kate Flood was horrified by the amount of food that would go into the bin at the end of each lesson. A long-time compost enthusiast, she decided to share her passion with others on Instagram – and Compostable Kate was born! Now with hundreds of thousands of followers, Kate has made a career educating people the world over about the benefits of composting. Johanna is meeting up with Kate to find out about her favourite method of composting, bokashi, and how everyone – even apartment dwellers – can make composting part of their daily life.
As the weather turns cooler, trekking out to your garden every evening with your kitchen waste and kitchen scraps for your compost bin can be irksome. So keep it all in the kitchen by putting your scraps – including normally uncompostable meat, fish and dairy – into a bokashi bucket under your sink. Within a couple of weeks, you’ll have non-smelling waste that has broken down and is ready for a fortnightly trek to your heap.
What are bokashi bins?
The composting process uses an inoculant – either a grain mix or liquid spray – to harness the power of bacteria to ferment food waste.
- Unlike traditional composting, where oxygen breaks down organic materials, with bokashi composting, a fermentation process converts scraps to alcohol and acids without air.
- The process doesn’t produce nasty smells of food decay and doesn’t attract insects or vermin.
- The result can be dug into your garden to nourish your soil or added to your compost bin or worm farm.
- You can siphon off the liquid that is produced and use it as a liquid fertiliser that you dilute with water – about two teaspoons per litre of water.
Make your own bokashi bucket
You can buy a fancy bokashi bin, or make your own that works just as well, but costs significantly less. All you need is two 20 litre buckets, one with a tight fitting lid, a drill, your food scraps and the essential inoculant (which you can find online).
- On the bottom of one bucket, drill about 20 holes with a 3-6mm drill bit. Put the drilled bucket into the other bucket and cover with lid.
- Start putting your food scraps into the bucket and the bokashi inoculant according to package instructions.
- When the bucket is nearly full, let it ferment for 10-14 days without opening the lid.
- Drain the liquid that collects in the bottom bucket every other day and dilute it with water to use in the garden.
- After fermentation, the contents can be dug into the garden, added to your compost pile or put in your worm farm.
Top tip
You may want to set up two systems – a second set of buckets for collecting scraps while the first set is fermenting.
Learn more about how to turn your food waste into garden gold with all the different forms of composting in The Compost Coach by Kate Flood (Murdoch Books, $39.99). It shows you how composting need not be smelly or time consuming, but a way of enriching your soil and also your life.
You can pre-order Kate’s book on Booktopia, available the 1st of August.
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