12/10/2026
A little update from Kat’s glorious walled garden, where she grows British flowers — and this time she’s feeding something rather less glamorous: her Bokashi bucket.
And this is where Bokashi gets really interesting.
We tend to call it “Bokashi composting”, but the first stage isn’t really composting at all. It’s fermentation.
They’re not identical processes or identical microbial communities, of course, but the principle is similar: we deliberately encourage particular microorganisms to take control of the material and change its chemistry.
In Bokashi, the bran introduces a community of fermenting microbes and, once the bucket is kept compressed and largely without oxygen, lactic-acid bacteria become particularly important.
Instead of leaving the scraps to undergo ordinary aerobic decomposition, those microbes ferment the sugars and other compounds in the food and produce organic acids including lactic acid and acetic acid.
That matters. As the acids accumulate, the contents become increasingly acidic.
In other words, you are essentially pickling your leftovers before returning them to the soil.
Which is also why a properly fermenting bucket should smell sour, acidic, vinegary or pickled rather than like ordinary putrefying food waste.
Then there’s the glamorous bit…
Bokashi liquid. That liquid contains water released from the food together with dissolved nutrients, organic acids and products of the fermentation process. It is very concentrated and acidic, so never pour it neat onto plants. Dilute it well with water before using it around the soil in the garden.
And remember: the fermented scraps themselves aren't finished compost yet.
Once the bucket has fermented, they can go into a compost heap, soil factory or appropriate garden system, where the next great army of organisms takes over.
Microbes → fungi → worms → soil life → plants.
That’s what I love about Bokashi.
It lets us take something we usually call “waste” and deliberately put biology to work on it instead.
No fancy machinery.
Just a bucket, some bran and billions of tiny workers.
And eventually…
food waste becomes soil food. 🌱
The Wild Florist Garden
