Local food: the afterlife

by Suzanne Miller

Since joining the Eat Local Challenge last year, I’ve focused on growing, harvesting and eating local food.  The fun stuff.

But not all the food I buy or grow ends up on my plate.  I cut off carrot tops, cull the cauliflower and peel the potato.  And then…?

Recently my Eatwell CSA newsletter talked about the farm’s compost, which is made from food waste gathered in the Bay Area.  This snippet caught my eye:

“Keeping food waste out of the dumps is very important.  In the dump, food waste decomposes and produces methane, a greenhouse gas.”

I emailed Eatwell and asked what I should do with my scraps.  The answer?  A stern “Compost! And if you fail, try, try again!”

My husband looked with unease as I hauled out white 5-gallon buckets for my annual “what the hell” compost attempt.

But this time, I decided to do something different:  bokashi, or “effective micro-organism” compost.

I’m deeply unhappy with our current means of dealing with garbage and plastics.  I wish I had a family pig or cow to feed the organic tasty scraps to, but that isn’t practical, desirable or lawful for me.   Most importantly, I enjoy being married.  My soulmate, lovely man though he is, doesn’t share my secret ambition to be a homesteader.

For the record, let me assure you that I’ve tried making compost the good old-fashioned way several times.  I created a lot of garbage and made a lot of insects happy.  If one more person tells me about how easy it is to make compost ... I’ll spare you the stories.  Finally, I faced facts:  I have a job, a kid, 2 gardens, and several hobbies which bring me pleasure rather than frustration.  To make traditional compost work, I would have to spend time and effort that I’d rather spend in other ways (I know! It’s easy! Don’t email me!). 

But Tom’s email motivated me to try it again.  I dusted off the Gardening issue of Natural Choices (my coop’s excellent newsletter) to read about composting my options.  Worms? Rotating bin?  …. Ah, bokashi!

Bokashi composting immediately appealed to me.  You don’t need a lot of space, you don’t need to figure out green: brown ratios – in fact, you don’t need brown scraps at all.  The bokashi system works inside and recycles all your food scraps, including dairy and meat.  Of course, you can still save your gardening snippets and leaves and put them in  a cold compost pile outside your house. 

The system is straightforward.  You put food scraps into a bucket, then dust them liberally with bokashi, a powdery substance that smells like soy sauce.  Bokashi consists of bran flakes inoculated with beneficial microorganisms that break down the scraps into liquid and solids.  It works on principles of fermentation rather than putrefaction.   Every few days, drain off the liquid and use it immediately on your plants, at a ratio of 1 tablespoon: 1 gallon of water. Once the bucket is full of scraps, don’t open it for 2 weeks while the solids ferment.  Then fold the solids into the soil.

You can order a custom-made bucket (the “Happy Farmer”) that drains off the liquid for you.  I didn’t like spending money on an untested system, so I bought 2 5-gallon white buckets, drilled holes in the bottom of one and nested it in the other.  The bokashi powder cost me about $15 online.  So far, so good.  I’ve been doing this system for about a week and will post results here.  But others are using it and I’m encouraged.  This might be a compost system that works for me.

Whatever your system, composting is the best thing to do with your food scraps, local or otherwise.  Our topsoil is disappearing.  Plants pull nutrients out of the soil and we need to figure out a good way of returning them back rather than in the dump. 

As a battle-scarred veteran of composting, I encourage you to work some element of composting into your Eat Local Challenge.

Resources:

More information about effective microorganisms

Happy Farmer Kitchen Composter

One family’s experience with bokashi (with directions for making your own bokashi powder)

Suzanne M. lives in Davis, California.

Comments

[naomi]

The thing that's keeping me from composting (now that I've escaped the kitchen vermin issue) is that I don't have a garden. Or a yard, or even a terrace... Do you know of anything we apartment-dwellers can do with our vegetable waste?

[Genie]

Suzanne, I'm interested to see how it goes for you -- I've been very intimidated by the whole (I know, it's easy!) composting issue, especially as a new gardener, but this system sounds much more tolerable to me than the whole layered-compost theory.

Naomi raises a good issue, though, too. What can non-gardeners do with their food waste?

Genie
The Inadvertent Gardener

[Suzanne M]

These are great questions. In New Zealand and Asia, it seems like bokashi and worm composting are done on a community level. So I assume there's a central place in each city to drop it off and a means of distributing to farms and gardeners who need compost.

In the U.S., I found this post about Seattle's program to get scraps from residents to create compost (see: http://betterdonkey.org/node/594). But nothing that directly answers your question.

Maybe a community garden, school garden? I wonder if a compost company or the recycling/garbage vendor in your area would take donations, too.

Does anyone else have any ideas?

[mipmup]

thanks for this information; i hadn't heard of this method before. i worm compost, but i'm always disappointed when i can't put in our dairy and meat scraps. i am going to try this since my worm bin is too small for the amount of scraps we generate anyway. (and i think our soulmates must be kindred spirits. i get a somewhat puzzled look whenever i report in on the worms.)

[Sara Zoe]

aaaaack! Bokashi! ok, so that reaction comes from a very very very bad failed composting (last summer's annual attempt) which ended, literally, with throwing up into the bucket due to the quantity of fast growing mold and the putrid odor. I'm sure it was our fault, and our lack of detailed directions fault. Your post contailed more detailed directions than we had.

Even if it had worked, turns out bokashi composting is not for us because it doesn't break the stuff down into actual soil and we are container gardening apartment dwellers.

So for this year's annual attempt (and I am so happy to read that other people also attempt annually) we have decided upon worms (which we are stalling on ordering because we do not want to pay an arm and leg for a worm bin). Bizarrely, it came as a result of wanting pets . . . .

[cookiecrumb]

Ohgawd. ::Head spins::
I'm following this conversation with hopes and dashed hopes. I have yet to attempt composting myself (and having recently moved away from some spacious property where I had no excuse not to but still didn't, I must be a tough case).
Now I'm in a townhouse complex with a decent patio, but all my plants are in pots so there's no "earth." (Poor, poor Sara Zoe! BTW, will you name your wormies?)
I will continue to check in on this discussion.

[Suzanne M]

I've heard good thing about worm composting, and if bokashi fails that will be my next try. Nice to hear I'm not the only one who keeps trying composting and failing.

I think there's a lot of people who don't want to throw scraps in the trash, but there aren't a lot of options for people without land or people who are compost-challenged (like me).

It sounds, in fact, like a business opportunity for someone in the Bay Area. Or you can put pressure on Newsom & Co. to start a compost program like Seattle.

[Marc]

Thanks for bringing bokashi to my attention. I might give it a try, as I generate a lot of vegetable and fruit scraps and trimmings. I have two worm boxes to take care of most of it, but the worm process works slowly. I toss the excess into my big greenwaste bin with the garden and landscape trimmings.

Alameda County has an extensive food scrap recycling program that is soon to grow to cover more cities. It's a brilliant concept, closing the loop of fertility so that compostable wastes from the city goes back to the farm. To be able to close the loop in my own backyard, however, would be even better. Eat local and compost local!

San Francisco has had a food scrap composting program for a while, and it received coverage in the S.F. Chronicle a few times: a 2001 article and a 2002 article, to name the two that were in my link archive. Oakland's program was covered on a PBS TV show, but I can't think of which one at the moment (California Connected?).

[Birdsong]

Yeah, Suzanne for going public on the fact that composting doesn't succeed for everyone. I have had success on the large-scale, at the school gardens where I worked for several years, but even the expensive compost tumbler didn't "heat up" the way the directions said. I have had to re-think outdoor composting where I live because it attracts bears, and if you love the bears, you don't want to be responsible for luring them in to human-occupied areas and learning bad habits, such as breaking and entering. I tried worms, but my paper scraps weren't shredded enough and it turned anaerobic, killing the worms (although I am probably going to try that again, but will also have scraps that can't go in the worm bin). I will be following your saga with interest.

[Sara Zoe]

this post got me in gear to order the worms - which arrived, disturbingly, all 2 lb of them, in a plain paper bag. the vision of the wriggling mass didn't get me and them off to a friendly start. for the first two days they tried to escape their bin - crawling up the sides and making wormy masses in the weird crevases of the bin - so, more ventilation, more dirt, more moisture, more wet newspaper - they seem content.

pictures (warning, a bit gross)

[Expat Chef]

Reading this almost gives me the incentive to go look at the pile of grass, leaves and food scraps that my husband has insisted on mounding (against neighborhood regulations) beside our house. The mound in question has always been a bit of an ironic object. You see, my husband does not garden. At all. Ever. Not even the herb-growing that I do. Zip. Nada. Yet the strange mound remains and is very occasionally tended.

Someday I expect a strange singing, cannabalistic plant to just spring forth from it's depths, like the one in "Little Shop of Horrors." Thank you for giving me at least a token appreciation for my spouse's bizarre efforts. You go, honey. Mind those snapping jaws, would you? Does life insurance cover that?

[cmate]

So how cost effective is this method? For example, if a bag of this stuff costs $10 or $12, how long will a bag last? Spending $10 per month would be pretty excessive I think. If it lasts 6+ months, that might get into a reasonable range...??

[Caley]

Interesting post and ensuing discussion! I'm from Indiana, and now live in NYC, and certainly encourage people growing their own food, despite being somewhat limited in my current location. (Looking into community gardens).

I've added a link to this post at my article, Grow Something. Thanks for your help!