If you've been intrigued by the idea of bokashi composting but find the thought of spending over $100 on a starter kit just to try it out daunting (or beyond your budget), there are some simple, dirt-cheap alternatives for getting started.
These cheap and free substitutes for pricey commercial products may not be as convenient to use or result in compost with exactly the same range of bioactive compounds, but this shoestring method will still help you transform your kitchen waste into fermented food scraps ready to break down quickly in your vegetable patch or balcony grow boxes.
Here's All You Need to Get Started with
Bokashi Composting for (Almost) Free:
A Lidded Container for Your Kitchen Countertop
You should avoid opening your bokashi bucket more than once a day, so keep a container in your kitchen to collect your scraps and add them all at once daily or every few days to your bucket.
I put a handful of shredded paper at the bottom of the ceramic canister I keep on my kitchen countertop and spray it lightly with the bottle of dilute EM1 (you can also use LAB...more on that further down) I keep next to the canister.
I add my scraps on top of the shredded paper (spritzing each layer as I add it), and when the canister is full (about every two days), I dump the contents into the bokashi bucket that I keep in my basement.
Two Larger Air-Tight Containers
These can be any durable containers with tight-fitting lids. Most people opt for some kind of plastic bucket. I use repurposed cat litter buckets. Aim for something you can fill up with scraps in about two weeks (three weeks max).
You want two containers so that you can have one that you are filling and another that is resting (about two weeks). If you want to get fancy and DIY your own bucket with a collection reservoir for catching the leachate, I did a whole post about that here.
Find a piece of plastic (a plastic produce bag works well) to place over the top layer of each bucket to help seal out the air and give you a clean surface to press down on to compact the contents each time you add more material to the bucket.
If you are using buckets without a collection reservoir for the bokashi leachate (the liquid produced during the fermentation process), make sure to add extra dry ingredients (such as shredded paper) between layers of kitchen scraps to soak up the liquid.
As a rule of thumb, if condensation is forming on the underside of the lid of your bucket, there is too much moisture. Add more dry ingredients to bring the moisture level down.
A Micro-Organism Inoculant
Bokashi composting relies on adding micro-organisms to your kitchen scraps to kickstart the fermentation process. The gold standard in bokashi composting is something called Effective Microorganism (marketed as EM/EM1).
EM1 is commercially-produced in liquid form, which you can dilute and use as a spray (or buy commercially-produced bran which has been inoculated with EM).
The cheap alternative to EM1 is making your own home-cultured Lactobacillic Acid (LAB) using rice-wash water, molasses, and milk.
Home-made LAB does not contain the same variety of microorganisms as the EM1, but it still contains enough bioactive organisms to get the fermentation started and keep it going.
You will find lots of instructions on the internet for culturing your own EM. Every single one that I've seen is actually instructions for producing LAB. LAB is not EM, which would be almost impossible to produce in a home setting, but you can still use LAB successfully for bokashi composting.
I've done a post here on culturing your own LAB (link coming soon).
A Dry Inoculant Substrate
The traditional (and most convenient and expensive) bokashi method is using packaged bran which has been commercially inoculated with EM1.
The cheap/free alternative is to use shredded paper, newspaper sheets, or coffee grounds in place of bran and do the inoculating yourself. If you have a cheap source of bran, it does work very nicely (even if you have to inoculate it yourself), but nothing will be as free as repurposed materials.
I personally use shredded paper straight from my shredder and a spray bottle filled with dilute EM to spritz both the shredded paper and the food scraps as I add them to my collection canister in my kitchen. I don't bother with the mess of inoculating the shredded paper and letting it dry, and then having to store it.
As long as you spray EM or LAB generously on everything added to the canister, you don't really need to have your dry substrates pre-inoculated.
I use EM1, but you could follow the exact same method of using plain shredded paper with a spray bottle of dilute LAB and get acceptable results. I've also seen people using chopped dry grass and rice hulls along with a spray bottle of inoculant. You could try sawdust if you have a source, but keep in mind that adding too much to your garden soil before it's completely broken down could cause a nitrogen deficiency.
Basically, whatever dry substance you already have on hand that's nontoxic and biodegrades is worth a try.
Here is a tutorial on using newspaper as a substrate:
This is how to use coffee grounds instead of bokashi bran:
Here is a video on how to make your own DIY bokashi spray (this tutorial uses EM1, but if you are on a tight budget, you can substitute your own home-cultured LAB and get acceptable results). I use a very similar method to this lady (except I use shredded paper, and she uses rice hulls as her substrate):
I hope this information helps make bokashi composting more accessible for anyone who might have rejected the idea because of the expense.
Fermenting your kitchen scraps really doesn't have to cost much at all if you use things you already have on hand, and the results are more than worth the small expense of buying the grocery store ingredients needed to culture your own LAB.
Happy composting!
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