Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm, I've done a couple of videos now on
bokashi but i still get frequent questions about the technique and its benefits so
there seems to be some confusion out there i want to answer some of those questions today
i even saw an article written recently that was aimed at debunking bokashi which i thought was a
curious choice i mean do you need to debunk worm composting or trench composting or hugelkultur
not really they're just different techniques for approaching the same kind of problem
each with their own advantages and disadvantages so let's get right into it
the short answer is the bokashi is an alternate way of dealing with organic waste
from your kitchen scraps so what you would do in this case is you place them into a bucket
you'd mash them down a little bit you place some inoculant on top just to get the process started
when you have that bucket full and you let it rest for two or three weeks it gets nice and fermented
inside of there you take it out to the garden you dig it into a hole in the ground the soil
organisms do the rest and so it's a great way of adding organic matter to your garden with as
little fuss and muss as possible not none of the complexities of dealing with a hot compost system
well that depends on what you mean by composting most people when they imagine composting think of
a compost pile in the yard where they'll add their kitchen waste and yard waste and all the organic
waste from their property and then over time aerobic bacteria will break that down along with
other organisms and the final the final result of that composting is that if you dig into that pile
you will pull out something that is dark brown and warm and moist and looks great for spreading
on top of the garden bokashi is different in that what you're doing is a fermenting pre-treatment
inside and when you're done that step you aren't ending up with finished compost you have to put
it out into the yard for an additional step in the soil where it breaks down
so the process is very different one uses aerobic bacteria the other one uses anaerobic bacteria
but the outcome is very similar
well you don't really have to choose between them i still use a compost pile in my yard for my yard
and greenhouse wastes but for kitchen scraps i prefer bokashi the reason i like it better
is there are fewer exclusions i don't have to leave out meat or bones or pasta or oranges or
anything else that are commonly asked to be excluded from a hot composting system
also it's less complicated i don't have to worry about a carbon and nitrogen ratio
i don't have to worry about layering i don't have to worry about turning the compost and
in a temp in a temperate climate like mine where you do get a kind of a colder winter
sometimes managing a hot compost outdoors can be a little bit more difficult with the bokashi system
i can just add a few more buckets to my system and manage it in the garage until the season turns
you sure can but you don't have to the bucket system is a very very easy setup
and i'll show you in this other video which i'll link up above here how you can set it up
for yourself with not a lot of money now what you may have to have on hand is bokashi flakes
usually a wheat brand inoculated with the microorganisms to get the process started
no i'm not in the business of making or selling bokashi brand i do make it for myself from my own
personal use and i made a video to show you how you can do that as well commercially available
brand usually has three types of organisms in it has lactobacillus it has yeast and has a
photosynthetic bacteria in there as well what i found in making my own that it's sufficient
to just use the lactobacillus to get the process started so that's what i do if you would prefer to
use for convenience the commercially prepared brand there's plenty of sources for those
i will link one in my amazon store just so you have an example of what to look for
well i don't see any reason why not and in fact if you do any kind of natural fermentation like
on sauerkraut or kimchi or pickles on veggies that involves lactobacillus that's fine too anyway that
you have a live culture of lactobacillus that's a great way to start your bokashi
the bran flakes are just something that makes it convenient for you to store inert bokashi
flakes so that you can use them all year round and don't have to keep a live culture on hand
well sure the bran is just a stable inert carrier for the lactobacillus so it doesn't matter what
it is so long as it stays stable when stored and store dry preferably you'll find that it lasts
about a year to be effective for activating your bokashi although maybe a little bit longer than
that would be fine too if you kept it in a cool dry dark place okay think of pickled cucumbers to
me they just look like darkened softened cucumbers or sauerkraut shredded mushy cabbage they're
really the process is not intended to break down the food all it's supposed to do is acidify it and
make it ready to break down once the soil bacteria gets a hold of it so if you've done it right what
you should see is it may be a little softer in texture and probably smells acidic like a pickle
well good question and some people do they call it trench composting and there's nothing
wrong with that there's a couple of reasons why i prefer bokashi over trench composting
one of which is that it's convenience i i don't want to have to go out after dinner every night
to dig a bit of a trench and put out my food scraps so it makes sense for me time management
wise to batch it and if i'm going to batch it i'm probably going to have to store it for a while
in the home until i have a large enough batch to make sense going out to the yard to do that if i'm
going to store it then it kind of makes sense the bokashi system is a great way to do that
because you'll have a whole bucket full of it it's a tight closed system so the flies
and other pests won't find it and make a mess of it first and you've already got the startings of
the lactobacillus in there to make sure that it starts to break down and rot in the right
way and doesn't get stinky or gross before you do that step the second reason i like it is because
i don't like to have uh when i when i put it into my compost i end up with rodent problems
now i can't say that bokashi is entirely without rodent problems but
i've known from experience that where i've placed my food scraps out in the hot compost system
continually ongoing week after week you end up with kind of a population of mice or rats that go
there and sort of make their living around that compost whereas bokashi if you're batching it
and you're only going out there once a month you find a corner of the property where you bury it
and cover it only the very largest of the pests and in this case i'm talking about skunks or on
one occasion a neighborhood dog with a sharp nose got into it but it breaks down relatively
quickly after that and it doesn't become a place for the rodents and pests to make their
living okay if you're using a two bucket system the uh extra moisture from the top bucket will
drain down into the lower bucket sometimes you have a spigot on that so you can drain that juice
out from the system that juice is a waste product of the process and you can just pour it off in
the garden now i've never noticed any particular advantage to the plants nearby when i poured that
out in the garden it doesn't seem to help anything particularly much that said it's not harmful
either now some people have asked the question of whether they can use that juice to inoculate
the next batch of the of the bokashi here's the thing that juice is quite variable sometimes
there's a lot of it sometimes there's a little of it it very much depends on how moist the initial
food scraps are it also is very inconsistent in its in its constituents you really don't know
what's in there in terms of bacteria so at that point you'd be better off starting with a known
bacterial culture than leaving it to chance as to what poured out through the bottom of that pot
okay so this is a related topic but it's not really to do with the bokashi bucket system itself
there's something called effective microorganisms remember i mentioned earlier that the commercially
available bokashi starter is lactobacillus yeast and photosynthetic bacteria there's a specific
mixture of those bacteria that have been put together and called effective microorganisms
the theory posed by a japanese researcher dr higa was that if you cultured these
microorganisms any large amount and you could put it into the field with your food crops
or with your with your agricultural crops and they would add a benefit to those agricultural
crops problem is that that research has come into problems with replicatability so we're really not
that sure uh whether it works so far as the bokashi system isn't is involved because it
started out using that em as its as its starter bacteria then it has become associated with all
of that research it's become associated with that but it really is quite a different system in its
usage so i just focus on the benefit of having an easy to use composting system for my organic waste
and i don't worry too much about whether it could have agricultural benefits
all right that's it for my video today i know that answers some of the more common questions i
get about the bokashi system but if you have other questions that you think i might be able to answer
go ahead and drop those down below a video and thank you so much for watching