"Creative" Bokashi

I was out of bokashi today, yet had a decent sized bucket of food scraps in need of going somewhere before they got gross. Of course, I could simply have gone and put them on the outside compost heap, but what fun is that?

There are a few guides to making your own bokashi starter online, but they all involve multistep processes that require at least a couple of days for the microorganisms to grow.
Bah!

So I improvised. Bokashi is there to colonize the food scraps with particular microorganisms, in order to quickly ferment the food scraps. Various strains of lactobacillus and yeasts seem to feature prominently in most mixes. Hmmmm.

I grabbed a half-used packet of yeast from the pantry & tossed it in a bowl with honey, warm water, and a bit of spoiled whole wheat flour. After I let that sit for my maximum attention span of 15 minutes or so, I threw in a couple of big spoonfuls of yogurt. There! Yeast and lactobacillus!

I topped it off with a bit of gunk from the jar containing my “let’s attempt to make red wine vinegar” experiment that’s been aging in the pantry since January. And then for good measure, I decided to dump another glob of honey into the foamy mess.

Let that age for another 15 minutes or so. That’s long enough, right? Not so good with the waiting, I am. Tossed the food scraps into the bokashi bucket, mixed more spoiled flour into the concoction, and spread the resulting glop on top of the food scraps. There!

The worst that can happen is that I’ll end up with a really stinky bucket in a few days, when the icky sort of anaerobic bacteria take over. Then I’ll just have to bury the mess and try again.

Growing Things

There’s not really any good place to grow vegetables in my fairly-urban backyard.

Half the yard is taken up by The Pond, aka hole in the ground surrounded by native plants. Another quarter is an ugly brick patio. The remaining quarter holds a swing set, mulch, and big bare spots of mud carved out by our German shepherd dog, Crowley.

This year I was determined to figure out *some* way to grow some food, which is how I ended up with a giant stack of 10 storage-tub-sized plastic planters, a.k.a. Earthboxes, in my entryway.

There’s still more than a month until warm-season crops can safely get planted here in Chicagoland, though, so most of them will be sitting there for a while.

While I’m waiting, there are trellises to build and seeds to sprout.

Currently sprouting in the basement: spearmint, black-eyed susans, lavender, rosemary, chard, basil, oregano, thyme, and several kinds of tomatoes and peppers. The first four on the list were planted ~2 weeks ago and look to largely be coming in nicely. The rest were just planted this weekend, so I’m still waiting for them to sprout.