Bokashi li li

  Bokashi in japanese means formentation. http://bokashi.com.au/How-Bokashi-works.htm
  It is a method to make compost. very simple.
Sourya showed us her installation: a bucket/mini barrrel, a tap at the bottom and a small container with rice husk activated with EM. that's all?! yep.
Well, what do you do with your kitchen peels/left-over-to-be-thrown food? take it to your Bokashi bucket and allow it to forment..
When Sourya, my cousin, showed this to us, we were delighted because our kitchen waste is not ready for our vermicompost; we needed the missing link.
A juice accumulates at the bottom. With the help of the tap, you empty the juices out regularly to a plant..
Excited with this missing link to our composting methods; we drove off to Koot road (nearby mini town) to buy the necessary equipment and returned home to put it together. wow for that price too.
We have begun to use it. filling the bucket and sprinkling rice husk over.
We gave a bokashi self made bucket to our friends Akash and Monica who are thrilled to use their waste for a good purpose since anyway it is going nowhere but to a pile god knows where. we will pick the bucket when full and use it here in the forest!
A step in the dream coming true! :)
Anyone interested? we can install one for you (we going multinational) and replace the full bucket with a new one.

Worms a-hoy

After the rounds of Auroville in the hunt for the vermicompost experts; listening to Jino demonstrate to us the way he made their vermicompost in Discipline Farm, then a quick look at the one in the Botanical gardens and to finish our research - the next day we visited Bernard at Aurobrindavan.

We have 3 boxes; 2ft x 3ft x2ft made by bricks with a pipe for the vermiwash.

Jino was nice to give us a few handful of worms mixed with compost..we took it ourselves as he was bedridden.

We made a bed of white sand and placed the worms with compost in a pile as there as not enough so to save them we added leaves to cool it and sprinkled water to keep its temperature down. We were a little nervous as the cow dung that was ordered a week had not arrived. We had planned to commence our vermicompost adventure with cow dung, get those worms to reproduce and acclimatise :)

We would like to use foliage and our left overs from the kitchen to make vermicompost..

“Vermicompost is 9 times better then normal compost!..The liquid that passes through the compost when we sprinkle it to keep it moist is very good for watering the plants or vegetables.. there are several types of worms..just put some leaves on the ground with some moisture and worms will begin to come and you transfer them to your box..it can take upto 3 weeks to get your vermicompost.. “ I am narrating what they have told me – we are excited and so eager to see happen!

The 3 boxes are side by side so we are trying to use the one in the middle and use the 2 on each side to begin decomposing leaves and and waste from the kitchen and when the center will be ready we will allow the worms to vacate to the fresh awaiting decomposing leaves..smart eh? It is working (positive affirmation) :)