There’s a “Feed me, Seymour” vibe about my pea plants at the moment. They’ve been growing so fast you can almost hear them. Lately they threatened to swallow a raspberry bush so I turned them back on themselves and now they are a sort of pea dome that hums with helpful pollinators.
I don’t know how these babies will taste but in many ways they will be flavoured by old leftovers. It doesn’t sound delicious but the proof will be in the popping. Under their strong roots are the remains of weeks of working from home breakfasts, lunches and dinners put first through a compost system that I’ve landed on after dabbling with many others. And I think it’s my favourite.
Bokashi composting originated in Japan. It involves a fraction of the work of keeping a sourdough starter alive and is the sweetest-smelling way to keep leftovers in the loop and use them to grow healthy soil.
A €43 kit (from originalorganics.ie) gets you an air-tight bin with a drip space at the bottom and a tap to drain off the liquid. It comes with a bag of bran inoculated with effective microorganisms, mainly the lactobacillus bacteria that we know from sauerkraut and other home fermentation projects. Two bins are a good idea but you can do a DIY second version with empty catering mayonnaise buckets (your local chipper should be happy to donate). Drill holes in the bottom of one. Slide it into the second undrilled bucket, sitting the perforated one on something solid to create drainage space and you have your system. Each layer of food waste goes into the bin between a handful of bran. When the bin is full it sits for two weeks (which is where your second bin comes into play). After that you bury the pickled food waste under a good depth of soil in yours or someone else's garden.
Uniformly brown
Unlike other compost systems where everything gets uniformly brown, bokashi turns the food waste more brightly coloured as if someone just tapped on an Instagram filter. Its tang puts off the potential lovers of composting food that we don’t want around our garden, and encourages the soil microbes to get to work on it next. The real beauty is that every calorie goes back into the soil, minimal amounts of methane are released as it’s a cold and anaerobic system and your plants are fed in a closed loop of grow, eat, compost.
The solution to food waste is to stop wasting it. Next best step is to share our surplus rather than bin it: say hello to Community Fridges (changex.org/ie). As a final step, using food waste to grow more food makes sense, a kind of growing it forward idea.
Catherine Cleary is co-founder of Pocket Forests
