The Kapiti District Council recently held a Greenest street competition where the idea was to see what street could generate the least amount of waste going to landfill over a given time. Participants had a choice of ways and methods to do this and these had to be approved by the organisers.
One street, Rainbow Court in Raumati had a number of residents elect to use ZingBokashi for the processing of their food waste and the comments below were contributed by Rainbow Court resident Glenda Robb.
Rainbow Court in Raumati's community garden
“Our Greenest St competition is over – and while we didn’t win the overall prize, we did get the best community initiative prize for our community garden.
I have dug several buckets of my bokashi bucket stew into the garden and am just amazed at how fast it seems to break down. As I’ve planted up my spring garden now, I took my latest bucket down to the community garden where we had a working bee today.
The focus of the day was building compost heaps, so my bucket went into the middle of one pile where I am sure it will get things going in next to no time. We made three big 1m x 1m x 1m piles using wood chip mulch, grass clippings, horse poo and bokashi, watered it down, and covered it over with old carpet. We await the production of compost in next to no time!
At least one of the other bokashi owners is doing the same with her full buckets as she doesn’t have a garden in her own back yard.
We have several large plastic compost bins in the community garden where anyone can take their organic kitchen scraps and layer them with wood mulch, so some are bringing their full buckets down and putting them into our system. We find that is a better way than digging it straight into the garden, as often there isn’t a gap when you need to empty your bucket.
Then, once a month at our working bees, we turn the compost and add it to the gardens when the gaps appear.”
