4. Bokashi Composting with
Down To Earth Garden, NYC
Volunteer / 2020-2023
Inspired by recyclefoodwaste.com
Working as a volunteer at the Down to Earth Garden in Lower East Side, Manhattan, has given me some of the most rewarding insights about the nutrients in our soil and about how we can help each other in the process of recycling food waste.
Composting is important because it helps the soil retain moisture and nutrients, attracts beneficial organisms to the soil and reduces the need for pesticides and fertilizers, reduces the potential for soil erosion, and sequesters carbon in the soil. I was introduced to the garden via Silvia Cohn, a designer currently in Italy, after attending a design job fair at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in 2019. The highlight of my time at the garden was in the summer of 2022 where I helped teach youth from the NYC Summer Youth Employment Program about bokshi composting.
What’s special about bokshi is the ability to ferment the food waste in an airtight bucket using a wheat bran based sprinkle that goes inside the buckets with the food waste. In a little as 2 weeks you have something in the bucket, that’s now ready to amend to soil.
After it’s fermented in the 2-8 week process (depending on the temperature outside) it can be added to the soil or to a compost system like a worm bin or pile.
One of the main methods we used at down to earth garden in the summer of 2022 was trenching. We kept a map of the plots for where to dig up based on how recent another bucket was burried there, so as not to overcrowd the timeline of soil with fermented food waste in one area, but rather to spread it out and ensure it was breaking down and mixing well under the soil in the ground.
The experience is very manual, which can get tedious at times. Other jobs beyond sprinkling in bokashi into the food waste and chopping it up in the bucket include, gathering browns which are rich in nitrogen, like leaves, sticks and branches and sorting them by size for use in the burial process.
Below is us making Bokashi sprinkle using the recipie found in ︎︎︎this checklist.
