You need good and healthy soil for your plants to grow. It all starts there. A really easy and good way to avoid buying soil is to start your own pot soil factory in a small corner of your house or your room/ apartment. The technique takes care of all your compost waste and is called Bokashi.
What you’ll need:
- two 10 litre buckets with airtight lids
- a bag of effective micro-organisms (EM), 1 kg cost about 10€ and you can find it at most garden centres or online.
- A bigger container, like 50-60 litres (The Samla boxes from IKEA are perfect for me). This is where you bury your compost every three weeks.
- One starter bag of sterile soil, cost about 2-3€.
Steps:
- Keep a bowl or bucket on your sink and store your daily compost there. At the end of the day, you empty the bowl into your Bokashi-bucket and add a spoon of EM-powder. It becomes a bit like a lasagna: compost, powder, compost, powder etc … Try to keep the Bokashi-bucket airtight, so only open when you need to.
- Once the bucket is full, let it sit to ferment for 2-3 weeks and then bury it in the soil factory container. After another 2-3 weeks, the fermented compost has turned into healthy soil!
That’s it!
You can keep making new soil in your house, in the garage, on your balcony, or you can also dig the finished fermented compost down directly into your garden beds.
I also have a bigger version in my garden, where I layer one 10 litre bucket, one cup of EM-powder, one bucket, one cup etc … I keep this in the garden. Like that I have a huge batch to dig down in a trench in one of my garden beds.
To advance this you can also have a system where you have TWO buckets in one bucket. You drill holes in the top one and out will come a fermented liquid that is an excellent fertiliser for your house and garden plants.
raori 