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Our Exemplary Urban Journey to No-Smell Compost

How we discovered a simple, cheap, compact method to compost indoors with ZERO bad smell.

By Richard SoullierePublished 3 years ago 8 min read
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Our Exemplary Urban Journey to No-Smell Compost
Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Anyone with any amount of green on their thumb appreciates good compost and soil. Rich soil smells good. Well, I have good news for you - your compost can have the same good smell right from the beginning, too. Can you say ‘year-round gardening’?

If that makes you smile, then I guess you also have a bit of a green thumb. By no means am I a horticulturist, agriculturalist, arborist, farmer, or anything of that caliber. Thing is, give me a dying plant and within two weeks I can turn it around. (I honestly don’t know how I do it.) Simply knowing this has made me happy, but I still grew up with only one or two plants in the house.

Until! That’s right, I put a ring on the finger of a woman who is energized and inspired by being surrounded by plant life. Our home has been filled with greenery ever since we moved in together a few loving years ago. Our big upgrade was when we bought our first house together - at the beginning of a global pandemic, I might add.

What we got ourselves into

We lucked in on a fixer-upper that also needed a green overhaul outside. It was the biggest lot on a small urban street with houses originally built in the 1960s. What the previous owner had done in the five years they owned the place was literally nothing. Not even move snow out of the driveway! Come summer, you couldn’t see half of the front walkway and we didn’t even know where the property line in the backyard was until we hacked our way through over 2m (7 ft.) of jungle-like growth. In Canada that means weeds, species of trees that are just like weeds, shrubs that have become dinosaurs, and vines that would make huge boa constrictors look petite! In fact, the vines were so invasive that big trees were bent over and dying and the electricity poles were already within reach of the vines.

You gotta love it when you arrive in a place at just the right time, eh? In fact, that laziness counted for double because the soil was five years free of chemicals and both yards were loaded with garden-boosting worms. It came with a price, though.

Quarries. That’s the nickname of our neighborhood because there used to be one here. (I call it the original Parliament Hill since it was a limestone mine.) I found this out the hard way when I had to dig two French drains at 1.5 feet deep by one foot wide and at least 20 feet long each. That amounted to free gardens walls around a large maple tree, a lamp post, a medium-sized mulberry tree, two garden beds alongside the front of the house, and over 50 ft along the decrepit retaining wall in the back yard. It was clear we would need a booster for our clay soil, for both the newly exposed lawn as well as those new gardens!

Lotsa work for me to dig out and place all these stones!

Suffice it to say, our first summer and autumn were filled with sorting the essentials, both inside and out, and we knew much still needed to be sculpted and designed in both the front and back yards. That thought was forefront on my mind when planning our anniversary at the very end of our first autumn in our first house. With lockdowns in effect due to a second wave and winter looming, I didn’t want either of us to get bored, so I chose my gift accordingly. I presented my fiancée with a couple of online courses we could take together, one being organic gardening.

Our discovery process

Presentation matters, so I decided to check the course first. When I logged in, I was dismayed that there were no how-to videos and what not included with it. The workaround came almost instantly, I decided that at least once every week during winter, locked down in our first home, we would read a short article and watch related videos for a good hour or so. (She loved it!) One of those topics was, you guessed it, composting methods.

When the topic of composting comes up, well, what images and sensations come to mind for you?

By Julietta Watson on Unsplash

For us, it was recollections of heaps of food scraps, leaves, and bad smells. None of those thoughts were fascinating for us, but we knew we needed something. I researched city by-laws to check for any legit ideas (and to be sure our neighbors couldn’t sue us with whatever we chose. Fortunately, we live in a place where both the municipal and federal governments were encouraging garbage reduction, so our options were wide open!). Still, we simply did not want to run the risk of our yard smelling or worse, having the raccoons that live in our neighbor’s shed get into the compost and make a huge mess.

Photos I took during our second spring which saw the momma carry her young out somewhere one by one. They nested by climbing on top of our neighbour's shed, entering through a large air vent with no mesh/grate covering it. Talk about a penthouse!

Pun intended, that took some extra digging on YouTube, but we found it: fermented compost. It met all of our criteria:

  1. Contain any possible bad smells
  2. Inexpensive (since we were already paying taxes for green bin service)
  3. Produce really good compost for use in any kind of garden
  4. Be fairly simple to use/maintain
  5. No chemicals

The name of the composting system that made our eyes light up is the Bokashi method. To be frank, I was so worked up because it was so simple. All it takes is two buckets, one lid, any food scraps you have, and some very special bran. Let it sit for two weeks and it will be ready to bury. And yes, it smells like dirt. From the second you put that special bran on those food scraps, it smells like dirt. If I had green thumbs living in an apartment, I would be green with envy at anyone with this simple system!

I am glad we only discovered bokashi mid-winter because one rare thing happened, I became impatient (again, it is that easy and effective). Fortunately, my fiancée kept my impatience in check by reminding me we’d have a forest of plants in the house if we started right then because of how long we would have to wait for temperatures warm enough to plant outdoors. (Some people in her online gardening group learned this the hard way, which amused my fiancée for a solid month, but I digress.)

Ok, I will share 4 quick tips with you so you can kickstart your own bokashi compost

Tip #1, buy buckets to save yourself a whole lot of money - do NOT go online shopping for bokashi containers. They make them and they sell them…for no less than $40 each plus shipping and taxes. Unless you are stylish to the point of needing a gold-rimmed toilet, then this kind of spending is pointless. Go get some buckets that cost less than $2 each (and can even fit under a kitchen sink). Really. I’m still shaking my head at that one…. (You can check out another article I wrote, entitled, "How Bokashi Composting can Surprise Anyone with its Effectiveness," which is about how we chose and setup ours.)

Tip #2, save yourself some space and time and just buy bokashi bran. Can you make it yourself? Yes. It takes a solid month and, for a week of that, it takes a fair amount of prime real estate. You can see how that’s done in this video, but we live in an urban setting where that kind of in-the-sun, flat area that is well-ventilated-but-won’t-blow-light-bran-away is already in-use with other things in our day-to-day. Plus, I could not imagine it is any easier in an apartment. Fortunately, a five-month supply of bran is cheap and tends to cost as much as a three-week supply (don’t ask me why, though). The bran lasts over a year and comes in small bags so don’t sweat it.

Tip #3, temperature matters. The storage space you select for the buckets and bran cannot be too cold or too hot - all bacteria are temperature sensitive, after all. Room temperature is fine, but if it’s on the cold concrete floor of a basement, it might take forever to be ready. Our first two batches turned out less decomposed than we would have liked, even when we switched to being generous with the bran (which had a positive impact).

Tip #4 (last one), depth matters. We found that just about any bokashi composting video you see has people burying their compost a good 1 foot (30 cm) underground. Why one foot deep? so that animals of any stripe will not be inclined to dig it up. I would also add not to bury it anywhere near the roots of plants, unless you can wait two weeks before you plant seedlings in the same spot. (You can focus on germinating while you wait.) Fortunately, we have a corner in our backyard where we can bury a five gallon bucket of stuff and swap it out every two weeks or so - right next to the raccoon nest in our neighbor’s shed!

In short, try to not mispronounce it like I do. It’s bokashi, not kobashi. Bokashi composting has a decent smell and is both clean and compact. Go google bokashi to see what it can do for you - even if you live in an apartment!

Here is our setup along with a bag of bokashi bran that we use. We actually have a second pair of buckets to cycle them.

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If you have really liked what you’ve read, please share with your friends (email, text, or social media). As always, feel free to check out other things I have written here on Vocal.

Thank you!

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About the Creator

Richard Soulliere

Bursting with ideas, honing them to peek your interest.

Enjoyes blending non-fiction into whatever I am writing.

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