Using Inoculants for Efficient Composting
There are a few cool practices of inoculating wheat germ husks, cardboard, straw, sawdust, as an inoculated medium that you sprinkle in layers between your food scraps. You will typically hear this referred to as “Bokashi” which is the name-brand of the technique. You do not have to buy into this brand to use this system of composting.
Essentially, you are inoculating a medium (rice hull, cardboard, wheat husk…) with a bacterial culture that breaks down material. You compost into a 5-gallon bucket with a tight fitting lid and every day or so (depending on how much you’re composting) you sprinkle the inoculated medium a handful at a time into the bucket. When the bucket is full, you put the bucket to the side for a few months. When you open it up you will find that there is no foul odor and that all of the material inside is laced with a white mycelium. You can compost most of anything this way, including meat!
When you put the inoculated medium in a 5 gallon bucket, the bacillus and yeasts and different cultures do not allow pathogens to take hold. In a sealed 5 gallon bucket if you blend your food scraps and add them to a 5 gallon bucket along with the inoculated medium it will put it in a state of almost suspended animation and predigests the contents into more of a yeasty or alcohol smell than anything noxious.
You can then take these 5 gallon buckets of predigested food scraps and either feed them to your worms in contained worm bins, or send them out to someone who has gardens to use the material in.
Personally, whether I'm in the city or in the jungle, I have a hard time seeing organic material, such as a banana peel for instance, go into the garbage. For some reason I've always known that that can be upcycled by the earth. It just does not seem right to allow it to go to the dump and become a problem rather than nourishment.
So whether you want to make a cubic foot of compost that you could use for months and grow some herbs on your kitchen windowsill, or you want to make a cubic yard of compost that you could mix with many yards of sand or inert soil that needs nourishment, composting is the way.