“The totally natural way to reduce, reuse and recycle organic waste”

Composting For Our Future

After leaving the scraps to ferment for several weeks, they can be tipped into a shallow trench in the vegetable garden to fertilise the following crop.	Awaroa Lodge gardener, Phillipa Boyd, amongst silverbeet planted in an area where Bokashi treated scraps have been dug into the bed.	My leeks three weeks after being planted inot the garden bed fertilised with Bokashi treated scraps.

It looked as ordinary as a bag of bran and a pair of buckets – no sign that the Bokashi kit I had just collected from the local Wastebusters office could solve some of the big problems facing the world.

A bold claim perhaps but reasonable: Bokashi can be used to process kitchen waste into fertiliser in just a few weeks. The amount of organic matter going to landfill each week is frightening: in Christchurch alone, 27% (over 70,000 tonnes) of the waste heading to the landfill last year was garden or kitchen organics.

At Awaroa Lodge the kitchen waste is layered with Bokashi and fermented in large barrels before being dug back into the garden.

I had read about the properties of Bokashi in articles on EM (effective microorganisms) and knew that its what you don’t see that lifts this bran above the ordinary. For mixed into the bran is a potent brew of microorganisms that spring into action when mixed with soil or onto layers of kitchen scraps in a bucket.

Once home, I sprinkled a layer of the Bokashi on the bottom of the inner bucket, added a 5 cm layer of scraps, then another sprinkle of Bokashi and another layer of scraps. Anything goes – orange peels, leftover casserole, vegetable bits, coffee grounds, the lot. The snappy plastic lid keeps the system clean and airtight.

A good method of processing kitchen waste is layer Bokashi treated scraps with soil in a plastic compost bin.

After a week when the inner bucket was full, I tipped the contents into a bigger (20 litre) bucket. To keep it airtight, I used a plastic bag as an inner cover, pressing down on this to compact the contents when I added more scraps. The smell is surprising – a pleasant silagey smell, nothing rotten going on here! This is due to the fermentation process – the microorganisms ferment the scraps. A white film of fungal threads on top shows the process is working. Without Bokashi, the scraps would putrefy (and stink!) rather than fermenting.

The liquid in the bottom of the outer bucket is a good fertiliser and should be diluted before using (I confess to killing an entire batch of brocolli seedlings by using it straight).

After the recommended couple of weeks I tipped the full big bucket into a trench in a part of the vege garden recently vacated by silverbeet, covered it, waited another week then planted leeks. By the time I planted the leek seedlings, there was no sign of the scraps. And now, three weeks hence, the leeks are booming. What a great way to be able to continuously crop in the vege garden!

Bokashi is a Japanese word meaning fermented organic matter. Japanese farmers traditionally used the technique of mixing microorganisms from manure into a carrier to make a fertiliser but it wasn’t till the development of EM in the 1980s that a reliable way of making Bokashi was formulated.

Since then its use for fermenting household scraps has taken off around the world. In many crowded Asian cities householders use Bokashi to process their scraps which they leave at a central collection point. The fermenting scraps don’t smell or attract vermin. The city authorities collect the waste and make compost for the intensive horticultural farms on the city outskirts.

A similar system works for some residents living near the Strickland Street Community Gardens in Christchurch. Locals can drop off their bucket of scraps and take home a clean bucket. The scraps are layered with Bokashi and soil in a plastic compost bin and later used as a component of traditional compost. Christine Blance, Project Manager of the gardens, explains that this is a great way of “holding” the scraps. “ Using Bokashi over the scraps speeds up the decomposition process and we have no problem with vermin or odours,” says Christine. “And we have diverted all those scraps from going to the landfill. It’s a great local solution to waste disposal.”

One of the interpretive panels at the garden at Awaroa Lodge in Abel Tasman Park.

Across town at a busy café there’s another example of the part Bokashi can play in local waste disposal. Every week, Lily White collects 10-15 buckets of the café’s kitchen waste that has had Bokashi added to it, and takes it to Riccarton High School where she runs the Kids Edible Garden programme. The scraps are layered with leaves and lawn clippings which would otherwise be disposed of at the landfill. The children use the resulting compost in their gardens. Everyone benefits.

At other schools with a Kids Edible Garden programme, the children use Bokashi to process the morning tea and lunchtime scraps. The scraps are layered with Bokashi in a barrel that’s been partly buried in the garden. At the end of term, a trench is dug, the fermented scraps buried and by the time school is back the garden is ready to be planted out.

Using Bokashi to turn kitchen waste into fertiliser has literally been a winner for Awaroa Lodge in Abel Tasman National Park. In 2005 they won the Innovation in Ecotourism category of the New Zealand Tourism Awards for their waste minimisation strategy in which Bokashi plays a big part.

Awaroa’s isolated location posed several dilemmas: the disposal of high volumes of kitchen waste and the provision of fresh salad greens for the restaurant. Bokashi helps solve both problems; the kitchen waste is processed using Bokashi and then dug back into the garden to fertilise the soil for successive crops of high quality veges. The lodge’s gardener, Philippa Boyd, shows me the garden – it’s an impressive 750 square metres of thriving vegetables, herbs and flowers.

Top Left: Neville Burt checks a batch of Bokashi
Top Right: The Bokashi Bucket System
Bottom: Neville Burt of Bokashi New Zealand showing a visitor the process of making Bokashi from sawdust and EM

Neville Burt makes the Bokashi at a certified organic property near Pleasant Point, in South Canterbury. Here he takes delivery of truckloads of sawdust, drums of EM, mixes the two together and gets Bokashi. (Actually, its not as simple as that as I see when Neville shows me the process.) After mixing, the Bokashi is stored in airtight barrels to allow the microorganisms to multiply, then it is dried, bagged and sold.

Neville is Mr Enthusiastic when it comes to Bokashi. He tells me about new uses of the product in hybrid toilet systems and in the toilets at mountain huts. In the hybrid waterless system Bokashi is added to the primary tank where it breaks down solids and reduces odours. These toilets are designed to have a long maintenance-free life: with Bokashi in the bottom there is virtually no sludge and only need to be pumped out after about 6 years.

Bokashi can also be used as a fertiliser. Neville shows me thriving gardens fertilised at a rate of a handful of Bokashi per square metre prior to planting and another handful after seedling establishment. Potting mix can be fertilised at a rate of 3-5% Bokashi by volume.

Several councils are currently running trials using Bokashi for kitchen waste processing. Christchurch City Council ran a very successful trial several years ago and now promotes Bokashi use by selling it at cost price at its service centres.

I feel like a convert after a few months using the Bokashi system. It’s simple and there’s no doubt the leeks look great. Now, if more of that 27% of organic waste going to landfill could be processed with Bokashi, we could all be eating more fruit and veges, there’d be less greenhouse gas, ……… yes, we could make a difference!