Tumbling Madness!
Who doesn’t love a garden? Not many people have a garden, let alone people that live in Brooklyn. So I consider myself lucky to have an urban garden, and after years of tending it and of buying soil at the local hardware store each year, I figured it was time that I should just start composting. Collecting my kitchen scraps to create compost would have a double-pronged benefit: first, it would mean that my food scraps would take up less space in the garbage can (and thus, would mean less landfill), PLUS the composted soil would be full of nutrients and good for my garden.
So for the past few years, my apartment has turned into a center for experimental composting. The dog and the husband have been kind and understanding as I have saved smelly discarded foodstuffs in order to achieve my double-goal of happy garden + less landfill.
But thus far, things haven’t worked out too well. Part 1 of my composting experiment was using the “Bokashi” system. I started off with Bokashi because it was touted as the perfect solution for indoor/apartment composting. And since I decided to start composting in the middle of the winter (I didn’t know if it was a good idea to set up a compost system outdoors in the cold, frozen weather), it seemed like Bokashi was the right solution. So this Bokashi system pretty much consisted of just an air-tight plastic bin, and a bag of what they called “bran”. This “bran” was a combo of “Effective Microorganisms” (which I think is a trademarked term, but which basically means beneficial microbes) and organic material, formulated to ferment your foodstuffs in an anaerobic environment. It kinda looked like oatmeal. The idea was that you would take your discarded food (and apparently, meats were okay to add to the Bokashi bin as well), cut it all up into relatively small pieces (more surface area = more opportunity for the microorganisms to do their thing and ferment the foodstuffs more evenly), liberally sprinkle some of the Bokashi bran on top, mix it all up with a spoon (I had a wooden spoon put aside expressly for this purpose), and cover the bin back up. I would do this every day or so when I had a lot of left-over food materials.
But then, I noticed that, whenever I popped the lid off, there was mold growing on the underside of the lid and the smell was pretty disgusting. Apparently, when ‘done correctly’, there should be very little smell… perhaps just a mild fermentation smell, like a yeast. But that wasn’t the case for me, and so – after many months of trial – I gave up. Add on top of this the fact that getting the Bokashi bran itself seemed antithetical to the whole reason I was composting in the first place. I mean, the only place I could find Bokashi bran was online, and it had to be shipped to me from Arizona each month or so. The use of the fossil fuels to send the bran to my door seemed to make absolutely no sense at all.
So I gave up the Bokashi, and as soon as the weather warmed up, I started Part 2 of my composting experiment: I bought myself a tumbling compost bin that I could put outside in my garden. I was worried about rats, of course… but the ad for the tumbling bin said that it was guaranteed to be rat-proof. (I’m not sure, on retrospect, how they could guarantee rat-proof-ness in a city like New York, but it was enough to allay my initial fears.) I set up my bin, and saved all my food waste (no meat or dairy this time, only fruits, coffee grounds, and egg shells), and started filling it up. Based on some reading I had done, it seemed like the best composting would occur when there was an equal amount of brown goods (like paper, or leaves) and green (vegetables and other vegetation), so I tried to also rake up leaves in the yard to balance out the mix.
My bin was good for about a year. In the winter, I didn’t add anything to it (since the food would just freeze and not decompose), but once the weather warmed up, I started collecting and composting again. The bin was black, so it was nice and hot and baked the food inside pretty well. It didn’t smell either. From time to time, I’d even see what looked like a bunch of mealworms in my bin (which I assumed were the result of flies laying eggs, but really, who knows). Overall, this seemed like a viable backyard solution until the day that I noticed a big hole had been torn in the bin. The bins are manufactured with air holes, for decomposition purposes, but it looked like something had enlarged one of these holes to a much larger size. After hearing about raccoons in the neighborhood, I had to put the bin on hold and stop my composting for the time being.
So, all that being said, so far I haven’t happened upon the ultimate composting solution just yet. I hear that there’s a lady here in Brooklyn that – for a fee – will provide you with a Bokashi bin and come by your apartment to collect it once a month. I’ve also heard that some farmers’ markets have eco-centers that will accept bags of discarded foodstuffs, so long as they are frozen. I’m not sure these other options are for me… so once the weather warms up, it will be time for Part 3 of composting system experiments in Brooklyn. Stay tuned!
