If you have a vegetable garden or a gardens, surely you have ever heard of natural compost and organic compost. It is an ecological way to recycle waste and enrich the soil of your plants without artificial chemical additives.
One of the most popular and beneficial types of compost is bokashi. Do you want to know what its benefits are and how to prepare it in your own home? So, join us in reading this post about what is bokashi or bocashi compost and how to do it at home .
Bokashi or bocashi compost: what is it
The word bokashi literally means ” fermented organic matter ” in Japanese. This is due to the origin of compost, which is precisely the country of the rising sun. There, the rice farmers devised their formula to boost the production of their land while taking advantage of their own waste.
Bokashi has a lot of advantages over regular compost, the most visible of which is its speed of preparation. Normal compost takes about 90 days to be ready for application, while bokashi is prepared in just two weeks.
In addition, its composition does not attract undesirable insects and, in fact, drives away many of them. It strengthens the beneficial microorganisms in the soil , thus giving additional protection to the plants, it does not cause unpleasant odors of any kind, and it enriches the composition of the soil, providing organic matter and a large amount of nutrients for your plants.
How to make bokashi or bocashi compost
By now, you will already be considering how to acquire or make your own bokashi at home . Do not worry, because its preparation is relatively simple and does not require any ingredient out of the reach of anyone. Gather the following ingredients and follow these simple steps to make your own bokashi.
Ingredients needed
- 1 container of 5 liters capacity
- 4 liters of tap water
- 6 kg of manure or chicken manure
- 6 kg rice husk or straw
- 6 kg of common soil
- 1 kg of charcoal
- 600 grams of ash or agricultural lime
- 600 grams of bran
- 100 grams of molasses
- A little yeast
This list is prepared with indicative quantities, and obviously you can reduce or increase them as long as you keep an approximate proportion between them.
Step by step homemade bokashi
- To begin with, we must prepare the inoculum, which is what the culture of beneficial microorganisms that we want to introduce into our bokashi is called. Place the water in the container, and add the yeast and molasses. Stir until smooth, cover and let stand 24 hours.
- In the space that you are going to allocate for the preparation of your bokashi, place the common earth mixed with the charcoal, which is preferably in small pieces of a similar size. Now add a layer of manure or chicken manure (chicken manure is usually richer in nitrogen), the rice husk and the bran, in addition to the lime or ash.
- Once this base is formed, add the inoculum from the container, pouring it over it, trying to distribute it more or less equally. With the help of a stick or a tool, stir the mixture and let it rest for a full day.
- Keep stirring your mixture twice a day, preferably in the morning and late in the afternoon. In about two weeks your mixture should be ready, and the fermentation process will have taken care of maintaining a high temperature that will have killed off undesirable microorganisms. It is important that you do not notice unpleasant odors in the process, as they are an indicator that something is not going well.
- After 15 days, you can use your bokashi to enrich the soil or substrate of your plants. The mixture will continue to be useful for about 3 months, after which you should get rid of the one you have not used.
How to use bokashi compost
As a type of organic compost that it is, it has no secret in its use. Here are some tips on how to use bokashi or bocashi compost :
- You simply have to mix the bokashi with the soil or substrate in which you are going to plant.
- In addition, you can use it both in orchards and outdoor crops as well as in pots or seedbeds.
- In the case of pots or seedbeds, it is sufficient to use a proportion of no more than 20% of bokashi.
- If you add it to the soil of your crops, you can apply it every 3 or 4 weeks to give your plants that extra boost of energy and protection against pests and diseases.
