DIY EM for bokashi composting

Discussion in 'Planting, growing, nurturing Plants' started by jesscam, Mar 30, 2011.

  1. jesscam

    jesscam New Member

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    Hi,

    I'd like to make bokashi composting easier and cheaper. Surely the liquid that you drain from your bokashi box is brimming in EM? Instead of buying EM to make bokashi mix, can you use the bokashi liquid to seed a new crop of EM? (as per this thread, for example: https://forums.permaculture.org.au/showthread.php?881-DIY-Bokashi-mix)

    Or maybe you can scatter a bit of saw dust over your scraps and pour / spray a little bokashi liquid on the top of it every couple of days?

    Has anyone experimented with this?

    Cheers,
    Jess
     
  2. sweetpea

    sweetpea Junior Member

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    I have looked into trying to make this. I found an article about effective microbes are purple nonsulfur photosynthetic bacteria. The specific EM mixture is made up of purple nonsulfur photosynthetic bacteria, lactobacilis (it's in yogurt) yeast, and water that doesn't have bacterial agents in it, like city water. You can let city water sit out for 3 days and it will be okay to use. the PNPB can be found in the water that stays in a bromiliad "cup" or in the roots of duckweed on a pond, or the reddish looking growth in mud around the edge of a natural pond. If you Google these terms you'll find a few things on EM, but I didn't find much.

    I have duckweed, so I put it in a bucket with yeast, pond water and yogurt, put the bucket in my dark, warm shower, and oh man, did it stink! Yuck! And honestly, I don't know whether I grew the plague or effective microbes, so I am very respectful of that mix. I wouldn't let animals or kids near it, and I'm not going to touch it. It's way more than a couple of teaspoons full of the powdered stuff you can buy. And I can't tell whether it worked or not! But I diluted it like crazy and put it on a new compost pile that I'm not going to mess with for a long, long time :)
     
  3. matto

    matto Junior Member

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