In this article from the Kamloops Daily News, Deanna Hurstfield is looking to start a bokashi composting network where she lives. It has a good overview of the process.

I need to respond to these lines in the article:

Bokashi seems to offer many advantages, Hurstfield said. The catch? It’s not cheap.

There are bokashi kits available through Internet dealers, she said. The costs of those systems appear to run at about $20 to $30 a month for all the supplies, substrates and microbe mixes.

Here are the costs for the first year of bokashi composting using my system:

*[two 1Kg bags are included with the bokashi kits]

In the second year or, if you have your own buckets as Deanna does, all you need is the bokashi: $60

Monthly cost: $5

I’ve been generous on the amount of bokashi you need for a year. Although I say that a 1Kg bag of bokashi will last 2 - 4 months, I’ve had customers come back for a second bag after 6 or 9 months, even a year later. Recently, a small office re-ordered a bag of bokashi nearly two an a half years after their first purchase!

While my competitor’s prices probably do come close the article’s monthly estimate for the first year, the cost in the second year is much lower.

"If we can find a microbiologist who can help us figure out what is in there, we can cut the costs even more," she said.

It isn’t hard to find what is in the bacterial culture used to make bokashi. This blog post from 2007 addresses the issue of making and using your own friendly microbe culture, as does Bokashi Composting.

I have never hidden how to make your own bokashi which will lower your costs even more. I only ask that you buy the Terra Biosa Friendly Microbes [aka EM] from me.:-)

Do it today!

From Digitech Laser:

We have decided to start an office composting system. We only have 13 employees so we aren’t generating a large amount of waste, but we still think we should try and cut down. Our first idea was to have a company come in and pick up our compostable materials, but after some searching we found that Vancouver doesn’t currently have this system in place. Smithrite offers this, but not for offices as small as ours. We then thought about setting up a worm bin, but from our research we think that this method can be smelly and there are a lot of materials that have to be kept out.

Then we found the “Bokashi Bucket”. It was appealing to us because it claims to have no smell, no worms, recycles all types of waste other than liquids and is small enough for in the office kitchen.

The post includes a link to my website and updates have already been posted

Thanks Nikki.
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Technorati Tags: bokashi, indoor, composting, indoors, office, workplace, fermentation, waste

I was informed the issue would be coming out July 1 [today].

However, I started getting calls on Wednesday but could not check my messages until Friday. Arrgh. It was an exciting day. I’m ready now….

Here is a scan of the full page:

and a link to Shared Vision’s website.

When I talk with people about Bokashi, I give them this brochure [.pdf]

Note: The image presented by Shared Vision is only one bucket. All my client photos show that two nesting buckets are used. The inside bucket has drainage holes and the outside bucket [the one with the label] is used to collect liquid from your material.
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This is a sticky post and will be featured as the most recent entry for the next few weeks. Current content below this one.

Technorati Tags: biosa, bokashi, indoor, composting, compost, fermentation, urban, waste, management, small, space, odor, odour, free, fruit, flies

Melor binti Mohd Daud from Perak, Malaysia started a blog - Bokashi Farmer - on WordPress and links to this blog, Susan’s article about me on her own blog and an article on Path to Freedom that I commented on a while back.

Thanks Melor. Here’s a link back you….

Links to all people mentioned on original page:

Inspiration overload

As I mentioned last week, a guerrilla gardening group recently formed in Vancouver. We met last weekend, and I’ve been thinking about how to introduce the group to Heavy Petal readers. You see, there are just so many cool people involved! It’s inspiring and exciting.

First, there’s our founder and fearless leader, Oren, a landscape architect with a focus on urban ecological design.

There’s Al, who some of you might know from his blog Urban Wilderness but who is now blogging from Al’s Bokashi Blog about Bokashi composting (Al, I must find out more about this!).

There’s Ward, the “boy” behind cityfarmboy.com, a company promoting urban farming and related products and services.

Read it all…