composting with bokashi

here's a little video i made about my newest composting system: the bokashi bucket.
bokashi is an anaerobic (lacking oxygen) composting method that essentially pickles your food waste with the help of some special microbes. you can even compost meat and dairy - which I'm stoked about.
i never know how to dispose of old meat scraps, and so i've been saving used ziplocks and sealing them up in there and throwing them out - but that feels so gross. i just know somebody down the line (either picking up my garbage bin or at the dump) is doing to have to deal with the nastiness that is some rotting meat in a plastic bag. eew. so i'm stoked beyond words to have a legitimate way of returning that stuff back into the ecosystem.
the process is pretty simple, you sprinkle the microbe mixture on top of any food scraps you put in the bucket, and then when the bucket is full you dump it into a hole and bury it in the ground for 2-4 weeks, and then it's decomposed! magic. you can even make your own bokashi powder, which i'd like to try when i run out. 
i've been hearing about bokashi and wanting to try it, but i was hung up on making my own bucket system (which of course never happened), and then i saw a deal come up on Kanu Values - full disclosure, this is where i work- but i've really been chomping at the bit to get a bokashi kit, and the deal sold out in about 30 minutes. the kit comes from each one teach one farms, here on o'ahu, and then have some pretty great resources on their website.
let me know what you think of the video - i'm pretty proud of my nascent video editing skills - next time i'll use my phone to film in HD, and probably repaint my fingernails.

btw, i'm over apologizing for not posting in forever, i fell of the "project a week" wagon. hard. and now i'm doing my best to get back on the horse.

week nine: planting in dresser drawers

ok, so it's not really "week nine." i'm a whole month behind on my weekly blogging project, so i'm playing catch up here with some projects i did a while ago but that never made an appearance on the blog.
when we first moved into our little studio we weren't entirely sure how long we'd be staying in the place. we have a nice little backyard space, and i was itching to grow things, but i didn't want to plant a bunch of stuff only to move out before we could harvest. so we came up with a compromise: planting in recycled dresser drawers. they provide us a sort of grab-and-go garden, able to pick up and take them with us if needed.

the neighborhood we live near, moiliili, always has a reliable supply of unwanted furniture on the roadside, so we drove around and collected old dresser drawers - ones with solid wood or metal bottoms. we turned these old drawers into planter boxes by drilling holes in the bottom - thanks to popsie's tools.

 we bought some potting soil - which i discovered is not, in fact, soil - but a mixture of peat moss, perlite, and composted material that drains better than regular soil and is good for container gardening. that being said, it's expensive to buy soil - potting or otherwise - so on popsie's recommendation i mixed the potting soil with regular soil we dug from our backyard.

we planted all kinds of stuff in the drawers: taro, kale, collards, chili peppers, yerba buena, okra, mustard cabbage, green onions, thyme, tomatoes, basil, sweet potatoes, and some other things that didn't make it like lettuce, cucumbers, and cilantro.

it was a while ago that we made the planter drawers, so things are growing nicely now. we even harvested our first taro this weekend - more on that in a future post. we also decided to stay a while in our little studio, so we've started planting in the ground, too.

week eight: garden harvest

i'm going to use the excuse of unexpected travel and sickness over the past two weeks to account for slacking on my blog projects. this post is less a project than a collection of bite-sized morsels that emerged from our garden recently.
first, there's the tomatoes. while the tomatoes we originally planted have not fared too well - the only tomatoes that grew to full size were enjoyed by the birds while we were away in oakland last week - we have numerous "volunteer" tomatoes that have sprung up around the garden in places they weren't planted.

i hate you, birds.

i assume this, too, is the work of the birds. these little yellow cherry tomatoes somehow are much healthier than their original counterparts, and have managed to produce several handfuls of wee tomatoes that i've actually been able to harvest before our beaked friends get at them.

also in abundance right now are our perpetually-baby kale and collard greens. i'm not sure why the leaves stay small, maybe i planted them too close together in the container, but they are quite tender and hardly need to be cooked.

they go great raw into smoothies. this one includes frozen berries and some poi - yum! as well as garden greens.
i'm a big fan of sauteed garden greens and eggs in the morning. this is a variation on that. i've always been curious about the "egg-in-a-basket" concept, and this was my first attempt at making it myself.

surrounding the egg in a basket are chopped fresh garden greens - collards and kale - as well as lightly sauteed green pea shoots - the harvest from my project of several weeks ago. i've also planted some of the peas along the fenceline to see if they'll mature enough to give actual pea pods. i'll keep you posted.
other things i'm looking forward to harvesting in the coming months: taro and sweet potatoes!

week five: compost death star!

i have been doing a lot of thinking about compost. it's not that i don't love my worms - i really love my vermicomposting worms. they just can't keep up with all the kitchen scrap waste we produce in our house. they are voracious little eaters, but we've come to find out that if we feed them too much at once it attracts black soldier flies to the worm bin. and while everyone says black soldier flies and worms get along fine and can be friends in that bin, that is not our experience. our experience with black soldier flies led to the untimely demise of our first beloved batch of worms (rest in peace), which you haven't heard about on this blog because it was too traumatic for me to discuss. and i still don't really want to talk about it, so suffice to say we replenished our worm colony and we stopped feeding them so much.
so we have been having a backlog of compost build up in our freezer (we keep a ziplock baggie in the freezer until we can put food scraps in the worm bin), and it became apparent we needed to start another composting system. if i had a little more space and wasn't renting a place where we live quite close to our neighbors, i think i would start a regular old compost pile in the yard. but i'm not sure how long we're going to be renting this spot and i'd hate to leave the landlord a pile of decomposing matter in the backyard if we move out. so i wanted to keep our compost bin contained.
i did a lot of internet research and read some excellent books from the library on different methods of composting, and i got excited about the compost tumbler as a system that was well suited (and fun!) for us. it's a self contained barrel that spins on an axis, thus providing ample aeration that is crucial to expediting the composting process. it keeps pests out, and looks a little more managed than a pile. plus you don't have to dig into it and turn it, which i think is one of those things i would avoid doing.
i wanted to build a compost tumbler myself, and there are great tutorials out there for how to do it, but i realized that it would take me a long while to scrounge up recycled materials to build with and borrow the tools necessary, and our freezer is filling up all the while, so i made the decision to buy one premade. i chose a compost tumbler i wanted, the cheapest model i could find, and went to purchase it online - because there doesn't seem to be anyone (besides costco - and they don't have the model i wanted) who sells compost tumblers here on o'ahu. however, as i found out through numerous online sellers and amazon, shipping to hawai'i would cost me more than the tumbler itself! so i had to scrap that idea.

purely by chance, (and maybe because i was a little bit obsessed) i found the CompoSpin compost tumbler, which is actually a spherical compost bin ball that rotates on a base. they carry it at costco online, but not in the stores here, so i found a seller on amazon that was willing to ship to hawaii for not too much money - this composter ships in pieces that you assemble, unlike the other models - and i bought it. i was super excited to start composting in my new ball (and i was eager to make some room in the freezer) so i anxiously awaited the estimated shipment arrival date, and i waited, and i waited. and finally i contacted the company who told me the only way they could ship to hawaii was by parcel post and it might take up to 6 weeks. which burst my composting bubble, but thankfully, and surprisingly, it arrived this weekend on our doorstep.


Death Star Composter from Willie Maze on Vimeo.

marty and i breathlessly assembled it (a really fun process of snapping pieces together) and brought out our squirreled away bits of food scraps we've been hoarding to fill it up. it turns out to quite resemble the death star. here's the video of that process, watch for the impromptu cameo appearance of our friend, brutus.