How to do basic Bokashi Composting in Japan

     A couple years ago I decided that I would start composting, but composting in Japanese apartments can be really tricky. Filling a lot of space with rotting garbage and making horrible smells on your balconies is bound to get you in trouble.

     I looked into bucket composting, which comes with a few options, but unless you know where to get earthworms in Japan, your best bet might be bokashi. A bokashi bucket has a special spigot at the bottom for draining the nutrient rich bokashi tea to then dilute and feed to your plants.

The bucket isn't too heavy and is easy to hoist up to this area so I can drain off the tea and add more garbage.

     In order to make the bokashi work, you have to also buy the special enzymes that you apply on top of whatever raw veggie and fruit cast offs that you're adding to the bucket. This is really easy to identify in the home improvement shops as it has a picture of the bucket on the front of the package.

     One of the problems I've had is the differences between what I have read on English language websites and the information on the back of the actual product. When in doubt, trust the product over internet info.

     When I started this bucket, I thought it was the same as compost, so I added other biodegradable things like shredded paper. This was wrong, because bokashi isn't compost. The contents really need to be just organic fruit and vegetable matter. If you do it wrong, the bucket will fill up fast and then you'll just be stuck with a full bucket of garbage the way I was for years when I gave up and decided to try again.

     After fully cleaning it out, I started again, and this time I actually read the package, thanks in no small part to Google translate. There I learned that things will disintegrate faster if you chop them to smaller pieces, so that's what I did with this melon rind.

     One interesting thing I read online was that the bokashi needs limited air, which makes it better for condensed apartment living where the smells of open compost aren't welcome. The website suggested only opening the bucket to add to it and then closing it immediately, which is a natural choice anyway.

     Another thing I thought was interesting is according to some information that I'd found, you're meant to empty the bucket of the fully rotted contents after a certain number of weeks and then bury that under some dirt like an acidic fertilizer. Because it's acidic, the suggestion was to bury it several centimeters from other plants and I just don't have that kind of space in the pots on my balcony.

     If I can confirm specifics of this fertilizer idea with a Japanese website or product description, I will bury the stuff at the bottom of a deep pot with some old dirt on top of it and hope for the best some time in the future. In the meantime, I am coming out twice a week to drain off the nutritious bokashi tea that I then dilute with water from my faucet and spray around the edges of the containers of several of my plants. The internet basically said to pour it directly on the plants, but the product said to dilute it by a factor of 1000 and pour it a few centimeters away so the acidity doesn't kill the roots. My nearly dead two-year-old broccoli plant has sprung back to life thanks to this, as did a cauliflower plant in a different container.