Los Angeles apartment dwellers could probably make use of a community composting initiative.

Successful apartment composting stories wanted

If you have a lawn or garden, you can easily transform food scraps into healthy, eco-friendly, compost. All you need to compost is basically a bin with holes at the bottom. But apartment-dwellers who don’t want to send fruit peels and veggie pieces to the landfill have a harder go of it. You need more involved equipment — and have to get more involved yourself.

This is why I haven’t started composting yet.

In fact, none of my local green, apartment-dwelling friends compost. And it’s not cuz we’re lazy!
…
It’s just tough to compost indoors. Jenn of Tiny Choices wrote a great post about the 4 ways to compost indoors. Guess what: Jenn doesn’t compost herself.

Are you a successful apartment composter? Share your story [greenlagirl@gmail.com] to encourage us all, and I’ll include them in a future post. In the meantime, I’m going to figure out how I can push Santa Monica, the city I live in, to give us green bins we can put our food scraps in for city composting. Homeowners get these green bins, but not apartment dwellers.

Composting indoors is a challenge but if you have no outside compost bin, then a combination of using bokashi and a worm bin* may do the job.

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*client

Oanh a lawyer in England via Australia writes about her experiences exploring composting options and finds that bokashi is best solution:

Halfway between Ca Mau and Sai Gon: Compost-ing

So I started reading about Bokashi again. And this time, one year on, many more people have it and have used it, and can attest to it. Since entering the blogging world, I tend to trust bloggers’ reviews of products. I can gauge how similar I am to them, or their process of thinking, by reading happily around their archives and deciding whether or not what they say can apply to me. I tend to search reviews on the internet and specifically on blogs.

…

Initially, I avoided Bokashi Man because, although he’s a blog [sic], he was a seller of the Bokashi bran and plastic buckets. I thought he would be commercial. But eventually, I returned to his site and had a proper read. He is full of useful information, and is not just trying to sell his product. Indeed, he directed a person from New Zealand (we Aussies call them Kiwis, but I think perjoratively, so perhaps I should not) to another site from which they could purchase the product. He’s also a decent read….

Nice.

P.S. There’s a neat pic on Oanh’s blog.

Technorati Tags: compost, composting, indoor, reviews, bokashi

A post from Tiny Choices explains

Four Ways To Compost Indoors

For those of us without access to backyard, frontyard, or even sideyard space in which to compost our food scraps, there are four ways in which we can participate in this wholesome and environmentally sound pastime from the comfort and safety of our own homes.

In the post they talk about the Naturemill composter, Worm composting, Community composting and Bokashi:

“Bokashi (Japanese for “fermented organic matter”) is a method of intensive composting“– and it’s supercool– basically, the bokashi (a dry mixture most commonly made from bran, molassas, water and “effective microorganisms (EM)”) ferments your food scraps in an almost odor-free way– the process is reported to smell like apple cider vinegar!

Bokashiman says: “Simply place your kitchen waste in the bucket, sprinkle a small amount of the [bokashi] mixture over the waste, slightly compress and reseal the container. The beneficial microbes immediately go to work to ferment the food scraps, releasing valuable nutrients and enzymes, without the problems of odour, heat or insects. The organic material does not breakdown, it pickles.”

Nice. They do a good job of including all the major bokashi suppliers in only four paragraphs.

Update: The blog post on TinyChoices includes some Q&A discussion about various options for finishing the bokashi in the comments section.
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Technorati Tags: compost, composting, methods, indoor, vermiculture, vermicomposting, worms, bokashi

Making Bokashi

Bentley relates his story on making a small batch of bokashi, including pictures and links to two different reference pages.

Truth be told, I wasn’t really looking forward to making my own mix. I thought it was going to end up being a huge hassle, and I wondered why on earth I hadn’t simply ordered ready-made bokashi. Now that it is all taken care of however, I’m very I glad I did! It was a lot of fun, and much easier than I expected.

Yes. Once it is done the feeling of accomplishment can be very satisfying. I offered a few additional tips in the comments section.

Was Where to put it.

from email:

From: Rob [name changed]

To: bokashi@greatday.ca
Received: 1/3/2008 2:49:11 PM
Subject: Where to put it.

Hi Al,

I found your website and your info on bokashi very helpful, thank you. I’m
in an apartment in **** and would like to start using bokashi.

My main concern is what to do with it once its done “pickling”. I was
thinking of getting a large plastic container, placing it on my patio and
filling it partially with dirt and then put the pickled food in there. Would
this work?

I was also wondering have you ever found anything that should not be put
in the bucket? From what I can gather pretty much anything that is organic
can be placed in it.

From: “Al Pasternak”
To: Rob
Subject: RE: Where to put it.

Hello Rob,

Thanks for your email.

You are on the right track by mixing dirt in containers on your patio.

Here’s a link from a site in England that is doing the same thing using planters:
http://www.livingsoil.co.uk/learning/planters.html

Laying a plastic bag/sheet on the top of the dirt in the bucket will work if your buckets are to big.

Citrus juices, milk and oil are best left out of the bucket. They won’t pickle. Hard cheeses are okay.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Al

Elise received a Bokashi Bucket from a fan who ordered them for many of her friends.

Melanie worked at the one of the Farmer Market vendors

Nancy

Another repeat customer - J.B.

Bruno is going to make bokashi for use in the school he works at.

Xavier is an friend/acquaintance that I have worked with.

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

Bokashi videos on YouTube

None of them by me, yet.

Also a list of suppliers of the friendly microbe liquid aka. EM to make your own bokashi.

I can only publish photos that I have permission to take.