A is for Apples

The fifth R is black gold! Refuse / Reduce / Reuse / Recycle / Rot (or Compost)   Rot might be the last of the five R’s but as a gardener I think it the best of all. Even when we grow or buy just the right amount of fresh produce that we need we still end up with some food scraps. Our compost scraps go into four different places: 1. Left over orange skins go into a glass jar filled with vinegar to soak for about six weeks to make an all purpose household spray cleaner (more on this another time). 2. High quality veggie peelings and small scraps get placed in the worm farm. While our worm farm is currently out of action once the weather cools down we will re-fill it with lots of wrigglers. 3. Fresh uncooked fruit and vegetable scraps (minus onion and citrus skins) go straight into our compost bin. 4. Everything else we feed to Ashley (the Bokashi) All of our scrap buckets (and glass jar of vinegar) are kept in the kitchen and emptied regularly - re...

Why we love our bokashi bin (we named her Ashley... the bokashly) For the first time since starting down a path towards low waste I can finally say that zero waste is a real possibility for our household. We don’t tend generate a lot of food waste that can’t be composted, but we do end up with some cooked left overs, or things like the crusts off our daughter’s toast that can’t go in the compost bin. We’ve also struggling with having a naked bin - as some of the bits of left over food waste were, well a bit sloppy. Not any more! Last month we bought a bokashi bin from Bulleen Art and Garden . It’s been a great investment for our household. We are now down to about half a bag of rubbish each week, we get even more free fertiliser for the veggies and in the last month we’ve not had to wash out rubbish bucket - yay for naked bins! While I know a few people who haven’t found the Bokashi Bin system to their liking, we find it really easy to use. It has an unusual but not unpleasant s...