Making Bokashi

Al
#1. January 7th, 2008, at 5:07 AM.

Hi Bentley,

Great job. It is good to start out small.

Since you are in the middle of winter, keeping your bucket of bokashi bags in a warm place [not above 110F] would be a good thing to do. The higher the temp, the faster the fermentation will occur.

Drying the bokashi when it is ready increases the shelf life and decreases the amount of bokashi needed for adding to your compost.
Low heat is best – again, not above 110F – I put a clamp lamp in my oven and tried different watt light bulbs to get the right combination. It takes about 5 days to dry. Your mileage may vary. As the bokashi dries, the fermentation smell will fill the house. I like it, but others don’t.

For your bulk batch call a bakery/food supplier for the bran or go to a local bakery and ask them to order it for you. If you talk with them nice, they may even help you mix it like I do
http://www.bokashiman.com/2007/01/making-bokashi/
which would be a lot less hassle than what Brian Smallshaw on Cityfarmer recommends for making large quantities:
http://tinyurl.com/2ctr2r <- This is my first batch

Cheers,

Al
http://www.greatday.ca

Kevin
#3. February 8th, 2008, at 2:54 AM.

Thanks for this write up. Can you tell me where you found each of the ingredients needed to make a batch.

Thanks,
Kevin
Buffalo, NY

karen
#5. April 13th, 2008, at 5:14 PM.

Hi all,
Is it not possible to make Bokashi mix using the microbes already in a ready-made bokashi? I mean, can I get the microbes in that ’starter culture’ to breed using more bran and molasses, similar to making yoghurt? It just seems silly to have to buy more microbes when I already have some…
Anyone got any ideas?

Karen x
PS I’m new to Bokashi, please be gentle.

Jessica
#7. September 3rd, 2008, at 10:04 PM.

We get our bran from a feed barn, or horse feed place. We usually get a 20kg sack and do the whole process on a warm day in the back yard – put the bran on a clean tarp., sprinkle on the EM mixture with a watering can and mix it/rake it in then pack it in a large garbage bin to ferment. Still not sure about how long to leave it – next door says it should have a skin of white mold on the top, (she’s the expert!) but she’s away right now and I have some that’s fermented for 2 weeks, but might not be quite ready. Anyway, once it is ready we spread it out on the tarp in the sunshine and dry it thoroughly over the course of one or two afternoons. This amount lasts us all year. Trouble is, it’s getting rather late in the year to dry it now, hope we don’t have to ferment it over the entire winter – which has happened before!
Oh, and re: the above comment – we usually put a kg of the old bokashi in with the new stuff when we add the EM.

Randy Wiser
#9. March 15th, 2009, at 7:19 PM.

Couple things. Food co-ops usually sell bulk amounts of most grains products, use google to find. I found that those 5 gal (sometimes larger) water “coolers” that one sees on construction sites makes a good airtight bokashi fermenter. Has a spiget in the bottom, tight fitting push on or screw on and its insolated. Much cheaper than any of the bokashi buckets I’ve seen and sometimes can be found at discount stores (found mine at Big Lots)

Randy

Eva
#10. January 19th, 2010, at 10:18 PM.

I am also wondering about adding finished bokashi as a ‘culture’ instead of using new bought stuff. Would you dig it up out of the garden? I met a lady years ago who was working at an eco resort and they were using bokashi to deal with all the cooked food scraps. They were in a very remote location and weren’t buying in bran or the EM, just using old mixtures to activate new mixtures but it seems like no one talks about this as an option. Unfortunately back then I didn’t pay enough attention to exactly how they were managing this. I have been working in developing countries and something like bokashi would be a great option for dealing with food scraps in slum areas- but only if you can, after the initial outlay, continue without buying anything.

Sally D
#11. February 2nd, 2010, at 9:41 PM.

What about using a few capsules of a “Pro-biotic” health treatment to get started? That’s pure lactobacillus and usually includes two or three strains. I figure if it’s good for our guts it’s probably good for Bokashi too.

bob prochazka
#12. March 6th, 2010, at 10:20 AM.

I bought 50 lbs. of wheat bran from an animal feed store outside of Milwaukee for $11.75 including tax. Question is, how badly was this stuff sprayed during the wheat growing process and how badly would that affect the end product?
No. 2. How can I tell how active my EM solution is. It has been sitting in a 50 degree basement all winter in a closed plastic bottle. I have been treating all of the kitchen scraps all winter and while the smell has varied every time I open the bucket up, it has been acceptable with different pickling odors. I put a 55 gal. plastic garbage can on wheels in the basement and have been filling that when I need to empty my 5 gallon buckets of bokashi after leaving them sit for four to six weeks.
No. 3. Can I take the pickled kitchen garbage waste that has sat and pickled for four to six weeks and make compost tea install of burying it? That would be easier.

Hyla
#13. June 1st, 2010, at 12:42 PM.

I am currently using the serum from drained yogurt for the lactobacilli, and newspaper instead of bran. I have read that leaves can be innoculated instead of bran or newpapers, and I have pleanty of leaves, which take a long time to break down on their own. Anybody have any experience with using leaves instead of bran in bokashi composting?