One Month In…
One month in to this experiment I did a tally. 32 Lbs. 5oz of food scraps into the bokashi. I only weighed the bokashi and not the worm compost, so I am not sure the entire total of food scraps that we diverted from the landfill.
This is CRAZY!!
I’m not totally patting myself on the back here. Another aspect of bokashi and worm composting is the opportunity to really get up close to your waste. The worms eat mainly coffee grounds and vegetable peels from the food prep. We have at least 4 – 2ft x 2ft worm bins on the go at any time. Six when things are really going. We have literally thousands of worms that need food. Where I am going with this is that the Bokashi is mainly food WASTE. Food that could have been eaten, but for what ever reason was not. It is great that we are diverting it from the landfill, but now the quest comes to lessen the amount of wasted food there is going into the Bokashi.
With the 32 pounds of food scraps, 36 Tablespoons of the Bokashi bran was added with each instalment.
The Smell
The smell when first opening the lid has not been over powering.
I wouldn’t dab it behind my ears, but it’s not a bad smell. Having the worm compost go anaerobic smells way worse. A sweet fermenting funk I’ll call it.
My air “squisher outter” works well for cleanliness. Though I think to do it again, I would make it a bit bigger so it seals against the side of the pail. This is hard with a tapering pail, but I’ll work on that. I would also make it heavier so it squishes on its own. With this one the compost needs to be opened to squish, which is counter-productive to an anaerobic system.
On the positive side, the amount of waste that we do still generate from our house of 4 is greatly reduced. Our neighbours upstairs, which we share a garbage bin with, coincidentally moved out at the end of January. No one has moved in yet, so it is easy to monitor exactly how much waste is leaving. In a 2 week period the garbage bag weighed just over 6 Lbs.
So, with no one else adding to the big bin outside, it’s not filling up nearly as fast as it used to. In fact,
We picked a good month to start. We haven’t had to move the bin out for the truck in over a month! February turned cold and snowy so it was nice to not have to pull a full garbage bin through a foot of snow. At 6 in the morning in -30. Just saying. It is fun to watch the garbage truck stop and wait for , someone to come running out after him. Ha ha!