Double duty bokashi composting

I have share a little garden update success. I’ve been doing bokashi composting (rapid composting) for a little while now and developed a routine that I thought I would share.

Bokashi is a method of composting that is basically fermenting kitchen waste with a mixture called EM-1 and then burying it in the ground to finish the composting cycle in about 28 days. It can vary of course according to the weather – in winter it takes longer than in the Summer but it’s safe to say when digging the soil back up after 28 days most of the kitchen material will be gone and you’ll have rich black fluffy soil in its place. (read an article about bokashi here).

The advice is to dig a trench in the backyard and bury it at least 8 inches deep after it has fermented. The deeper the better and given  I have birds and thick heavy clay soil I opted for another way of doing it.

I got a big water tub for horses from costco. Drilled drainage holes on the bottom and  filled it with used potting soil. This mixture that is basically a mixture of peat moss, perlite and old compost. I buried the bokashi  as deep as I could, basically a couple of feet and then on top I planted lady slipper radish.

I thought this would be perfect because in about 28 days I can harvest both the radish and the nice rich soil!

You’ll notice that I have a square frame with hardware cloth that I used to cover the bin. Basically this is so the birds don’t dig up the seeds but you’ll notice there is little or no bug damage whatsoever on these plants. The hardware cloth in this waist high bed seems to deter most pests that would bother the plant. Once the leaves touch the top of the wire it reminds me it’s time to harvest both plants and soil if I wish.

On what to do with radishes I like to use a salad shooter and slice them very thin in a butter sandwich or in this case I made a braised radish dish by Rachel Raye.

You can plant other things besides radish though that work well for this setup. In the winter I planted fava beans to introduce nitrogen to the soil. When they reached the height of the screen I harvested the young shoots a few inches high and found out when blanched, boiled or stir fried like Swiss chard they taste very similar and are loaded with healthy nutrients!

You can also mix a lot of salad seeds and harvest as loose leaf lettuce in a “cut and come again” kind of crop.

To aid in the composting process I also got a handful of red wiggler worms from the local bait shop and put them in the soil. When I harvested the soil not only was it black and fluffy but full of so many worms – they loved it!

I like this method of composting not only because it’s fast with little odor and little space but planting a shallow root crop above the composting material helps maximize space and accomplish two things at once.

How is that for an organic multi-tasking no-work style of gardening? 🙂

 

On another subject I just had to share a few photos of the chaos people will go through for a tomato. It seems that gardening is a serious business!

 

As my mom said of the Master Gardener’s Great American Tomato Sale they have REALLY big tomatoes 😉

And here is my little loot that will be planted in fresh bokashi composted soil! 🙂