I spent at least an hour today uprooting weeds, moving rocks and digging massive holes in the garden, which was tough work (Iain cut his finger with our "Yay it's FINALLY PAYDAY" new kitchen knife and so wasn't able to help); it was intensely satisfying even if I got pinioned beneath the heavier-than-it-looks rotting wooden platform after a particularly strong wind blew it on top of me. I'd been very excited about today for almost a month now, because today was compost burying day, and if you don't share my giddiness about this, then possibly you didn't grow up in a household that siphoned bathwater two stories down into the garden during droughts or where the term non-indigenous invasive plant has become a dirty word. That last sentence was quite long and possibly nonsensical, but that's how excited I was today.
The minute I realized we had a garden, I suddenly couldn't think about anything else except starting a compost pile. I blame this squarely on my warm, funny, wonderful mother, who has set the bar high when it comes to
stealing people's trash in the name of making the world a nicer place*. Though I spent most of my childhood cringing every time she picked through the trash and chided us for throwing away tea bags, or pulling the car over so she could ask neighbors for their grass clippings, clearly she made more of an influence on me than I'd ever imagined, because the thought of gardening without some sort of compost system just seems ...wrong, somehow. This may be because, thanks in part to her compost, my mom has the most beautiful garden in the world (not that I'm biased), which routinely turns out a wealth of delicious vegetables and herbs. Or it may be because, the more environmentally conscious the rest of the world gets, the more I realize my mom has been ahead of her time for years. Either way, I immediately started exploring my options given our smallish kitchen and smaller yard.
Though I toyed with the idea of ordering worms on eBay (is that weird? I think it might be a bit weird) and starting a worm bin, I quickly stumbled on a Japanese form of anaerobic composting called
bokashi. There are
many,
many comprehensive explanations of exactly how it works elsewhere on the internet, but basically: kitchen scraps go in the bucket, you sprinkle a handful of bokashi bran on top, seal the bucket, repeat till full, periodically draining the liquid runoff, and then eventually bury the contents, which have been fermenting away without smelling wildly unpleasant, in the garden, where, according to the internet, they will break down considerably more quickly and without attracting pests. I am really, really praying that this last part is true.
above: the inside of a brand new, sparkly clean, bokashi bin.
As for finding the bokashi bin itself, I can only profusely thank Yuka, the nicest person in Numazu. Our first week at work, she told us to ask her for help if there was anything we needed. I don't think she imagined that the first request would be for a highly specialized compost bin (she hadn't heard of bokashi) but within 24 hours she had found one.
At any rate, after a few weeks, the bin was finally full and ready to bury, which is why I spent the morning digging three massive trenches in the garden. You can't see them in the photo above (which is the garden after I was finished) because I am slightly paranoid about weirding out our neighbors and so - with Iain standing guard - buried everything as furtively as possible, in furtive shifts, with many furtive glances to make sure no one was watching. We haven't had much contact with our neighbors at all, though sometimes the old woman who hangs her laundry on the other side of that white fence points to our flowers and chatters about them too quickly to be understood. As nice as she seems, I'm a bit worried how the sight of a bunch of kitchen waste being freely buried might look in trash-disposal-obsessed Japan, and my Japanese is not up to the task of no, don't worry, thanks to an innovative fermentation process, this kitchen waste has been restructured on a molecular level and so is no longer appealing to pests, so please don't call our landlord.
Above: in case you were wondering how I'm frittering away the money from my first paycheck while Iain is out buying knives (and decent frying pans): multi-colored nasturtiums!
Anyway, three trenches and a lot of very pickle-y smelling vegetable scraps later, the first batch of compost has been clandestinely buried. So now, we start over and wait, and I'll try to keep any further compost related developments to much shorter, less-digression prone entries, as I'm pretty sure the only person reading this at this point is my mom (Hi Mom!) In the meantime, tomorrow we get our Golden Week on and head down to Shimoda, where there are (we've heard) both white-sand beaches and the Black Ships that brought the first Westerners to the island.
* because when you're a kid and your mom has the only compost bucket in the neighborhood, that's sure what it seems like. The fetid smell of grass clippings will always remind me of being nine years old and so totally convinced I have the weirdest mom on the planet.
