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For years, no one but my wife knew my secret. I had an addiction that would have made even the many strange people I knew blush. After family dinners, cookouts, nights out, after getting home I'd secret away a bag full of the good stuff, sneak out back. Hidden from my neighbors, I'd reach my goal, partake in an ancient ritual. The sack would open, and onto the compost pile would go whatever was left from supper, everything I could stash without being "too" obvious.
As the years went by and the garden grew, my appetite became keener. One day, I watched in horror as the town maintenance guys came and vacuumed up the leaves my neighbors had raked to the curb. I thought they'd raked them for me, but the town got them all. Resolving never to be undone in such a way again, I bought a pickup truck from a woman with a stage name of "Destiny" and a fully obvious profession. The bags and buckets would give way to truckloads, and the garden would grow. Faster, if I could ever convince my wife what was and wasn't supposed to be composted in the kitchen.
My wife gave away that truck, not because it wasn't useful but because I could never get the damn thing titled (hint: don't buy trucks, cheaply, from people with fully obvious professions unless they have title.) Years later, still somewhat uneasy about talking to "strangers" about my affliction, I approached a local fish market. I wandered, furtively (and somewhat conspicuously, as the store isn't much larger than my garage), until my chance. My nervous, roundabout introduction probably boils down to: "Hello, I'm a gardener and would like your fish parts."
I was absolutely astonished when he immediately agreed. Those were heady days, my friends, for me as a compost junkie. I was collecting 15 gallons of coffee grounds, 20 gallons of fish parts, and a yard or so of llama doo, weekly. I was, quite literally, dreaming of the transformation of soil I was undertaking. For the next two months, I was, if you will, in hog heaven.
I trenched much of the fish, mixed the coffee grounds with sawdust and piled and top-dressed with the llama doo (which you can do, just as with rabbit pellets.) And then, I got swine flu. A year before it was popular, I came down with it on my son's 2nd birthday, and two weeks later finally found the strength to get out of bed. When I looked out into the garage and realized my wife had dutifully retrieved all of the fish parts, I knew I was in for something.
Being, in my nature, one of the laziest people you'll meet, I knew I'd have to do something other than dig a big trench for this. Not only was I lazy, but at this point, I was still recovering, too, and digging that big a hole just wasn't an option physically. Piling was not an option, either, because in addition to being lazy I also have an unnaturally weak stomach, poorly suited to composting this sort of stuff above ground without a mountain of browns.
Being lazy does have its advantages though, because after all these years of being so I've observed that someone less shiftless has usually figured things out for me, if I happen to wonder enough to try and find out. In this case, my answer came from someone with another wonderfully descriptive name, CaptainCompost (I originally came across him through a gardenweb discussion, seemingly now defunct).
I read that all I had to do was treat the fish parts, in the buckets, with some molasses, some sawdust, and some dirt, stir vigorously daily, and I'd have fish emulsion. I did so, dutifully and, honestly, prayerfully. I did quite expect to injure some curious raccoon with an exploding bucket, but that didn't happen.
Six weeks later, the buckets still passed the sniff test. The soil had inoculated the mix with organisms which fed the molasses and out-competed the organisms that would cause the stuff to putrefy. The anaerobic environment "brewed" the by-products of the stuff by breaking down (sugar) into vinegar, making it too acidic for insects.
Unwittingly, I wandered into a way to compost things that you normally wouldn't (fish parts,) but would also work for just about anything else. The bonus is that it works a lot faster than typical composting, too. It would be a little while before I knew it all came together, but I was sold on Bokashi composting before I even knew the term.
Bokashi composting is pretty simple actually. The main thing that happens is that you keep waste (in my case food waste but conceivably any other sort) from going the rotting route. This is accomplished by introducing bacteria which out-competes the organisms that typically induce decay. This is a time-lapse photo of a peach left to rot for 6 days:
As you can see, the thing shrivels slightly, then more, and is gradually covered by mold. I use it as example because it helps to explain the bokashi process.
In the photos, the first stage (shrivelling) is an example of how living cells decay. The first thing that happens is that the material starts to break down, and "leak" water. With no vitality left, the cell walls break down and the thing desiccates. It's at this point that 2 things happen: opportunistic bacteria and single-cellular organisms (mold) colonize the excess water and bugs start laying eggs. For the composter, this is all pretty normal stuff. What happens later, though, is that the sugars start to bring in more and more bacteria, the mold loses, and the material starts to hatch eggs and putrefy. What's left, at the end, is a desiccated piece of material similar to that banana peel I found on the seat between my boys' carseats the other day (hey, I told you, I'm lazy): it's a like a piece of leather, and to compost it I'd need to rehydrate it and wait for it to be broken down by less voracious activity.
Doing this on a larger scale, say 10 peaches or 100 banana peels, proves daunting. You end up with a muddled mess of material in very different stages, and most of them well on their way to producing really, really bad smells. While one fish bucket every couple of days didn't bother me, I knew that all those buckets, at once, required another strategy.
Instead of getting to this stage, though, why not circumvent the "worst" parts of decomposition (putrefaction, maggots)? Skip those stages and render the material "food" at the end? Basically, that's the bokashi process in a nutshell. It's preserving material by introducing lactobacillus, that same stuff that makes pickles, sauerkraut, pepperoni and sourdough. I bet you're wondering why you'd want to do that.
With 40 gallons of fish bits, and spring heat coming, I had to figure out a way to "deactivate" the decomposition process. Otherwise I'd have, to put it mildly, a mess of stink on my hands. By treating it in such a way (using CaptainCompost's suggestions), I ended up with some great compost/fertilizer, without any headache or stomach tossing.
Now, instead of running to the compost bin daily, I put it in a smaller container next to my garbage can, treat it with lacto, and only have to empty the bin every 2 weeks. I can put just about anything in there, too, and not have to worry about flies, the dogs getting into it, and when the bucket is filled I don't have to worry about it stinking. The most important advantage, from my perspective, is that the stuff breaks down much faster than "traditional" kitchen waste compost. Because it has been pre-treated, and is not desiccated, it breaks down very quickly to "simpler" organisms and in fact, has to: most carrion-type insects can't lay into it because it is acidic. The sugars in the stuff ferment, and you're left with, basically, pickled banana peels.
It doesn't stink, and it breaks down quickly without attention. It's the best compost method I've come across, and I've done a lot of composting with every method (except soldier fly grubs, which I mean to try soon). While it does have a nominal added cost (in terms of time and material,) I think it more than makes up for that cost with the facts that you can compost meat/fish/dairy easily and save all that time back-and-forth to the compost pile.
I'll reiterate that the monetary costs to do this should be less that $20/year. I became very passionate about telling people about it only after I learned that the cost, from source vendors, was ridiculously high.
It is not a a complicated process to make the bins or the "bran". In the next couple of weeks, I'll be (hopefully) leading a group through the process of making the stuff, in large batches, and will plan on posting video/photos. If anyone has any questions, before then, or is interested in how to get started using this method, please let me know (through messaging probably best), and I can provide instructions and/or materials.
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