bokashi myanmar – Bokashi Myanmar

Exciting new projects and a new bokashi yard!

by Bokashi MyanmarJanuary 19, 2019January 19, 2019 Leave a comment

JANUARY 2019

Read about our project so far, it’s interesting! The November update here, October here, the September one here, and the back story here.

Our mantra is that organic waste IS. NOT. TRASH.

Every day it gets clearer to us just how important that is. The streets and backyards of Yangon are filled with trash. And the tragedy is that it’s the same story every you look. In cities, towns and villages in Myanmar, and in many other parts of Asia.

We’ve gotta do something about it.

Here. Now. Fast.

Lots of people are talking about plastic. We’re drowning in it, and we can no longer ignore it.

Here in Yangon we’re seeing a lot of good initiatives on many fronts — Thant Myanmar is working with awareness and education, Trash Hero and Clean Green Yangon are two of many spirited groups working with cleanups, organisations like Conyat Create are working to create the conversation that for too long we’ve not been having, companies like RecyGlo are getting involved on a commercial scale with recycling.

Brilliant.

But it’s all about plastic (apart from RecyGlo who are working on many fronts).

And plastic, although it’s probably the most disgusting part of the waste stream, is just part of the story.

More to the story

Our story here at Bokashi Myanmar is ORGANIC WASTE. The soft, wet stuff that comes in some way from plants and food. Stuff that can perfectly well be returned to the soil, returned to nature, because that’s where it came from in the first place.

Organic waste is perfect for recycling!

It’s not complicated like plastic, that has to be sorted into many different categories before it can be recycled in the most effective way. It’s not complicated like metal, glass, batteries, electronics, building materials, that all have to be sorted and moved on to a responsible processing plant for rational and clean recycling.

Organic waste is easy.

Everything goes back to the soil. No sorting needed, no special knowledge or technology, or advanced processing plants.

The trick is to just give it back to the soil.

Soil food

But NO ONE is doing this! And you can only imagine how sad this makes us. Because the soil is screaming out to be fed and we are wasting the seemingly endless supply of “soil food” that we could be feeding it with.

Two-thirds of the waste that goes to landfill in Yangon is organic. The other one-third is non-organic, the fractions like plastic, glass, metal and so on. That’s TONS** of organic waste that ends up on the tip every day.

Another huge amount, we have no idea how much, just lies and rots at the roadside or ends up in the nearest river.

Which, even if it disappears, is absolutely not recycling.

All of this organic waste should be used for feeding the soil.

We can do that by making compost, by fermenting and digging it down into the soil, by making organic fertilisers or liquid nutrients.

There are various options, but they are different versions of the same basic equation: what comes from the soil should go back to the soil.

So. Why has this not been done before? Why is it not being done now?

(**2,000-3,000 tons per day, in Yangon alone)

Organic waste is “too difficult”

We’ve spoken to a lot of people about this.

The general conclusion is A. that it’s too hard, and B. that no one knows how to do it.

And making matters worse, people generally don’t see the difference between the two basic forms of waste: organic and non-organic. The first step in this process will always be to separate the two. Because the recycling approach is totally different.

Here at Bokashi Myanmar, we have a completely different mindset.

We’re not interested in sorting out the issues related to recycling plastic, glass and metal — we’ll leave that to the many experts in the field. For us it’s way too complicated anyhow.

But we are good at recycling organic waste. In fact, we think it’s quite straightforward from a practical point of view. Logistics and education are another story, but actually making a great organic fertiliser or super healthy soil is, for us no big deal. It’s what we do.

And we really want to get the whole Myanmar involved in this part of the waste puzzle. Because it’s something we can do on every street corner, balcony, back yard, urban farm, or even “real” farm.

Bokashi is hardly rocket science, anyone can recycle organic waste using this method, but it needs to start happening in real life.

Soon. Now.

End of speech. How about our projects here in Yangon?

They’re going great!

We’ve had a busy few weeks starting up new projects and moving our existing ones forward. You can read more about our waste management project in the Ward 67 community and our partnership with recycling startup RecyGlo here, in our November update.

This month we have three exciting new stories to tell, and I want to tell you about a gourd.

The RecyGlo team — daring to break new ground

School garden!

First story: we are starting up a school garden project at Dulwich College, one of the leading international schools here in Yangon. A very cool project, as the students (the school has all ages) already have a nice kitchen garden.

But the soil? It’s good, but it’s all been brought in from outside and needs regular fertilising. Nothing circular about that.

Meanwhile, the school is working towards environmental certification in the form of a “Green Flag”. Recycling of dry fractions is underway and that leaves the wet. One of the teachers, Matt Grace, is now bringing bokashi into the school canteen.

All food scraps will go into the bokashi barrel from now on, the students will learn about how this works and why it is important, and then the different classes will add “their very own” bokashi fertiliser to their class garden beds.

So smart and inspiring. And there’s an educational angle at every turn. We’ll keep you updated how it goes! (And we have more international schools asking us to help them with this approach, makes us happy!)

**One of the beautiful garden beds at Dulwich College. They just need to be fed!**

U Thant House, an inspirational oasis

One of the most respected men in Myanmar history is U Thant. He was Secretary General of the United Nations from 1961 to 1971, a complex period of nation-building in which he provided a strong and clear leadership worldwide.

His house, here in Yangon, has long been abandoned but is now being restored by a family trust into a museum and educational center: the values he most stood for are those at the core of this new museum project.

U Thant House is an oasis!

The garden is one and a half acres of calm and shady peace here in the middle of Yangon. Next step, now that the house is more or less renovated, is to restore the garden into a true Myanmar-style haven. With indigenous trees and plants, and a totally sustainable message running through every part of the garden.

Like everywhere else in Yangon, the soil in the garden is poor. Sandy, undernourished. Like most other parks and gardens, the garden waste has been sent off to landfill or left languishing in a corner.

Our job, which we volunteered for within 5 minutes of visiting the house, is to help restore the soil, and to add what we can to help bring the garden to life.

We started a few weeks ago, working with the garden team at U Thant House a day or two per week to get the ball rolling. Ultimately, we hope to be able to share the bokashi story there with visitors, show what we’re doing, talk about why this is a valuable part of the sustainability story, help them learn if they wish.

To start with, we structured up the compost yard. And had so much fun in the process! We now have a very space-effective garden compost going that will produce compost for the garden, based on our bokashi methods (there is a difference to traditional composting; it’s faster, easier and more nutrient-dense. And extremely compact).

Next step, starting this week, is to start collecting food waste from the nearby market and next door school, and start building soil for U Thant House’s new kitchen garden with that. As well as boosting the compost no end with this essentially free and very valuable addition of nutrients.

It’s a brilliant circular story, sustainability at best, so we will work with getting it right. May take a while, but this is a fast-moving team with a lot of passion, so I suspect it will go faster than any of us think.

Some of the team at U Thant House after one long day’s work

New bokashi yard!

Our next exciting news from these past weeks is that we think we have a new bokashi yard! Super exciting! We’re doing the last negotiations, Myanmar style, at the moment and hopefully it will all be clear this week.

It’s close to our existing yard, totally overgrown, but is twice the size with no house. So we have lots of space to work and can start receiving organic waste from the local markets (we have two), start making bokashi, and gradually start producing some organic compost and fertiliser products for sale.

We’ll also receive the bokashi barrels collected by our partner RecyGlo from corporates and households, swapping their full barrels with clean empty ones ready to go back to their customers for another round of food waste.

Cross your fingers this goes well!

And we’ll tell you next time how it’s all shaping up.

6 kilo gourd

Oh, and the gourd story I promised?

The other day we harvested this beauty. 6.2 kilos (we had a guessing competition, Inda won). It is grown in bokashi and sand and nothing else.

Our yard is a kind of desert, like many other houses in monsoon-drenched Yangon it has a half-meter thick layer of construction sand. Infertile and hard to grow anything in. But all the bokashi we have been digging down these last months, made from waste from the local market, has paid off. We’re harvesting these beauties every few days at the moment, and handing them out to the neighbours. Because there’s only so much gourd you can eat…

They taste great!

Amazing, really

And, when you think about it, it’s kind of revolutionary. No fertiliser, no tricks. Just sand and bokashi. If we can do this, anyone can. Any old piece of land can be made fertile with the right approach.

Which means anyone can grow food anywhere. Even in an urban desert.

Groundbreaking!

We’re happy.

/The Bokashi Myanmar team

And! Super thanks to our colleagues at Bokashi Norway! They amazed us this year with a Christmas donation to our project that will be a huge help in renting our new yard and setting it up. We really appreciate the global teamwork, and all the heart that goes with it. Hugs to you all!

Making a garden in a swamp

by Bokashi MyanmarNovember 20, 2018November 22, 2018 2 Comments

Read about our project so far, it’s interesting! The October update here, the September one here, and the back story here.

New projects and a ton of enthusiasm

Towards the end of October the monsoon peters out and finally stops. Well, there have been a few surprise storms and we’ve had to run in all directions to protect our small plants, but like everywhere else in the world, weather patterns are changing.

Foto: Jenny Harlen — On the way to our project in Ward 67 — always with an umbrella handy!

Living with a lot of rain half the year and no rain at all the other half of the year is just normal life here. Actually, there are two distinct climate types in Myanmar: here in Yangon we have the on-off monsoon climate, but in other parts of the country, further from the coast, the zones are drier. Mandalay and Bagan, two of the areas a lot of tourists visit, are part of huge regions that are more or less in permanent drought.

Either way, this puts enormous pressure on the soil. Whether it rains too much, or too little, it’s always the soil that will make the difference. A good soil, with a lot of organic carbon in it, will buffer water way more effectively than a soil with very little carbon.

Carbon is the stuff we usually refer to as humus.

Alive and healthy

It’s the stuff that makes soil good, gives it that special soil fragrance that you just know is alive and healthy.

Soil doesn’t ever have as much carbon in it these days as you would think. If someone has 7 or 8 per cent that’s amazing, and kind of unheard of. Many farmers are struggling with levels of 2, 3 or 4 per cent. Or less. Usually it’s not measured and not discussed; the conversations we should be having about soil are replaced with orders to chemical fertiliser factories.

So. Weather patterns. Climate.

A soil with a lot of carbon can buffer water. If it rains a lot, the soil absorbs and manages the water and holds the top soil in place while the water has a chance to drain away. Strong soil like this is sort of glued together in the right way, it doesn’t just dissolve and wash away.

A soil with a lot of carbon also drains better. And it hangs on to the nutrients that are in it.

Some parts of Myanmar have really sandy soil. That’s what we’re dealing with in Yangon. Actually, it’s not even sandy soil, it’s more like river sand. Former rice paddies have been filled with river sand to raise their levels. The sand drains well, great during monsoon, but it doesn’t hold nutrients well and is therefore not the most nutritional start for new plants.

Other parts of the country have rich clay soil. Clay is full of nutrients normally, a fantastic resource. But clay can also be very low in organic matter, and this makes it difficult for plants to thrive. It gets waterlogged easily, and can become so sticky that it can’t breathe — hopeless for plants that need oxygen round their roots.

Adding organic material

Adding organic material to sand provides it with more nutrients. It helps those nutrients stay in place. And it gives the sand more glue to hold itself together. A good sandy soil will will drain well even if it rains a lot. But it will give plants a better base to grow in than just sand.

Adding organic material to clay also provides it with more nutrients. And helps them stay in place. But it gives the soil a better structure, easier for plants to thrive in. It’s easier for the plants to breathe. And while the soil will still hold valuable water really well, the organic material helps it to drain better if it is too wet.

The strange thing about this is that the solutions for troublesome sandy soil and troublesome clay soil are actually the same. Add more carbon!

This applies just as much if you’re a gardener at home, a small-scale urban farmer, or a big-scale “real” farmer. More carbon into the soil works, every time.

So. Back to our project!

We got through monsoon and most of what we planted to test our bokashi beds is thriving. Now we have to learn how to water it every day! That at least wasn’t a concern when it was bucketing down all the time.

Best combinations

One of the most important things we need to establish here in our project, before we scale it up too much, is what combinations of sand, food waste and brown waste (such as leaves and coconut husks) work best. What type of beds work best for the plants in the wet and dry season, and what is the best way of making large-scale bokashi beds: above ground or below ground? What proportions?

We have experimented with many different variations, and planted fairly randomly in everything we’ve made. We’re not professional gardeners by a long shot, but that just adds to the fun. And proves to us the value of having good soil — even if we don’t do things perfectly, our plants seem to thrive anyway, because they like the soil we give them. And if they don’t, we experiment some more, to find out what would work better.

This is giving us a good base to stand on.

Time to scale up and move on to the next challenges!

The two projects we’ve got going so far – our own bokashi yard and the waste management/urban farm project at Ward 67 in conjunction with the French NGO, Green Lotus are going well. We’re consolidating what we are doing and looking at ways to increase the volume of organic waste we are handling.

Foto: Inda Cakka — Our brand new handcart!

In our own yard, the best purchase we’ve made so far was a new hand cart. Exciting! Now we can more easily collect organic waste from the nearby markets without having to involve so many trishaw guys. At this stage we’re still doing all this ourselves; soon we’ll move to a bigger yard and get some help with the daily logistics. But one step at a time.

Every Tuesday we work with the team at Ward 67, in the eastern part of Yangon (Dagon Seikkan). The women there are filling two bokashi barrels per day with organic waste from the market, we hope to increase that soon. On our Tuesdays together we empty the barrels, layering them up with brown leaves and coconut husks that they’ve also collected. Top it off with sand and wait for it to become soil.

The women have planted roselle and other plants in one of the new beds. So far so good, they seem to be healthy.

We do have a problem however with kids messing up. So the next step is to involve them in the project, show them what we’re doing and why, and encourage them to grow their own small plants. Maybe later, even help them to start a small garden at home.

This part of the project is being run by our colleagues at Green Lotus, the French NGO running the overarching project in this ward. We may be good at making soil, but all the social stuff that surrounds that is rather beyond us, so we’re really happy for the teamwork. And so are they.

Next project: corporate recycling

More recently we’ve teamed up with a Yangon-based company called RecyGlo. They provide recycling services to corporate clients on a subscription basis. The company just started last year, but the two founders have strong entrepreneurial backgrounds and a lot of skills, so the business is already running strongly.

Until now, RecyGlo has focussed on paper, plastic, metal, glass, all the usual “dry” stuff. Wet waste, organic waste, has been an impossible task for everyone up until now. In best case, organic waste is trucked off to landfill, mixed in with everything else. In worst case, it ends up on the street, or in the river.

Anyhow, the two founders came up to see us a couple of months ago, and have been trialling bokashi with some of their corporates. It’s working for them, and this month they are rolling it out to their other clients and anyone else who may be interested.

Foto: Diana Tobias — First bokashi delivery to RecyGlo

Quite a challenge

A challenge, and an exciting one at that. There are some pretty big question marks, obviously. Are people really prepared to pay for this service? (remains to be seen). Can they learn to fill the bokashi barrels correctly? (we will be providing training — so far we’ve made a quick and easy video to explain what to do) And: where will the filled barrels go for processing?

This is the interesting one. Our plan is, rather soon, to get a larger bokashi yard where we can receive organic waste from various sources. If RecyGlo gets it to us, we know what to do with the rest. We’ll combine this of course with the organic waste we collect in from markets. Ultimately, we’ll produce a compost-type organic fertiliser in our process. And a method that can be scaled up or down as needed.

We’re taking a step into new territories with this. But one that makes sense to us. It’s what we have on our vision map and, like all visions, the path from A to B is not always that clear. If it was, someone would have done it before. In this case, they haven’t. And it’s up to us to find out.

Which is quite a cool challenge, and one we’re ready to take on.

So please follow us on this journey! It will quite interesting for all of us to see where we are at this time next year.

We’re thinking big, acting small, trying not to let fear get in the way of anything we’re doing it. We would be a good ad for Nike actually, Just.Do.It. It’s fast becoming our motto.

/Jenny and the Bokashi Myanmar team

Community bokashi: Let’s make an urban farm!

by Bokashi MyanmarOctober 22, 2018October 22, 2018 3 Comments

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IMG_2254 (1) — The hardest working guys on the block!

Within the city limits of Yangon, there is a community of some 20,000 people living without electricity, without water, and without waste collection. Even in this, admittedly, under-serviced city this is a low-water mark. They deserve better. Anyone does.

A French NGO, Green Lotus, who is working with the community, approached us to see if we could help with the waste management part. Our concept of structuring up organic waste and building soil resonated with their vision. And for us, it would be the ideal project to test our methods against all possible odds.

An urban farm would be the obvious solution.

But the problem is that the community has no land, and most of it is under water for half the year. There aren’t enough jobs, and money is scarce.

So… A farm?

Obviously we wanted to give this a go.

We spent some time out in the community talking with people and felt very strongly that we wanted to be part of this. We met a lot of people we liked, they seemed to trust us, even if they couldn’t really get their heads around what we were proposing.

Actually, it wasn’t even that sure we knew ourselves what we were proposing, but we knew that if we started somewhere, did something, we would gradually find our feet and make it work.

The French team was starting out with a waste survey. They wanted to find out what waste was generated daily and weekly by the sample group of 30-40 households. We interviewed each family in their home, asked them to collect their waste for a few days, and we went through all of it (later) by hand to see what we had.

Surprisingly little food waste from each family actually.

The reasons being one, that a lot of it is given to street dogs and the neighbours’ pigs and chickens; and two, that people here are poor, their diet is simple, and if they cook something they eat it. And because cooking facilities are for the most part very basic, they buy a lot of food ready-cooked in the market. Fresh fruit and vegetable peelings were noticeably absent in the waste we collected. There was however quite a lot of green waste, things like flowers from the family shrine and brown leaves swept up from the yard.

Next step was to analyse the market waste.

See those small verges out front? We hope to build micro gardens there.

This turned out to be almost totally organic waste. And a lot of it — at least 500 liters per day, probably more. Now that’s something we could do something with!

We talked with people in the market, how did they get rid of the trash, what would they think about having it collected to be made into soil, what other factors were involved.

When we started this project, there was a small, unofficial landfill in town. The government provides no services here, so it was just a bit of land that had become a dump. On a waterway, which meant that quite a bit of the trash gets washed away in the rain.

However, some weeks later, this dump has been closed and there is now NO dump at all. The only possible solution for people is to dump their trash in the river.

So, an alternative seems even more valuable now than ever.

Sceptical? Interested?

I guess we got, and are getting, a mixed reaction in the market.

Some people get it, and are pleased to see their waste being put to use. Even if they can’t quite get their head around how we’re going to do it.

Others are a bit quizzical. Like, why are all these Europeans going round and collecting our trash and getting so excited about it all?

We started with a small pumpkin seedling in a cement sack of bokashi and sand. And now it’s growing big and strong!

But whatever. There are no problems, no resistance. And Aye Aye, our wonderful team member, is a whizz at making people feel good. She chats with the people in their market stands (in Myanmar, obviously), explains what we’re doing, has a bit of a laugh with them, picks out the plastic bits patiently so they’ll hopefully get the message, and let’s them know when we’ll be back.

She has a team of local women with her now, learning the ropes. Gradually, this part of the process is becoming theirs. And with it, hopefully, will come some pride in doing a valuable job. (The women by the way are paid for their work at local rates, a subsistence economy such as this has no space for volunteer work at any level).

Building a garden

This is much the same process we deployed in our own bokashi yard: collect lots of organic waste, ferment it in barrels, and dig it down.

The problem here, though, is that there is nowhere to dig it down. There’s a cement road through each main row of houses (dirt tracks between the others) and the houses that branch off this are largely underwater for half the year at least. They are built on poles and have precarious bamboo bridges and the like between them, but apart from a small verge there is little or no land.

And here we should build gardens?

We’re pretty sure we can do a lot with these narrow verges in due course.

But meanwhile our starting point is at the community center, a relatively new building built on poles like the rest of the settlement. It also has a verge area at front. And there is some free space between it and the next neighbour where we thought we could reclaim some land and build a garden of sorts.

The women in the team cleared the idea and we all gathered up one day a few weeks back to do the work.

The day was a miracle of teamwork and community effort.

Amazing.

Building the first bed, on the verge out front.

Nothing at all was organised when we arrived, Inda (our team-member and natural leader) swung into action and structured it up and soon people were coming and going in all directions.

Someone organised a truckload of sand, a team of labourers appeared with bamboo poles, slats and tools, a team went off to collect all the waste from the market, another to collect coconut husks and brown leaves from the neighbourhood.

Within an hour, we started building our first bed. A bamboo enclosure, basically, in front of the community center where we layered up 12 barrels of fermented bokashi with about the same volume of brown waste (coconut husks, brown leaves, shredded paper). We topped it with sand and that was it.
In a week or so it will be ready to plant.

Reclaimed land

The next project was tougher. We decided on an area of some 10 meters by 3 or 4 alongside the building and started to fence it in with bamboo poles and panels. Standard procedure round here.

The water was some half meter deep, brackish and smelly, but we built the frame then started filling it with sand. By hand, of course. Gradually we ended up with a meter deep layer of sand that is relatively stable inside the enclosure.

This is where we will build our garden, using exactly the same method as we did out front. It will take a couple of months, as we are doing deep bokashi here — possibly as much as 300 liters of food waste per square meter layered with at least as much brown materials. It will give us a half-meter of top soil to work with later. Not any old soil, but enormously rich bokashi soil.

How we use it is not yet clear, it’s up to the local team. Create a garden, a market garden or micro urban farm? Or harvest the soil for use elsewhere and refill as needed?

It will come clear.

Interestingly, when we asked the women what they wanted to grow the response was immediate. Flowers! Beautiful flowers! Rare and delicate orchids, and other beautiful flowers.

Have to admit I was surprised. I was expecting to hear spinach, roselle, banana trees, cabbage. Food, basically. But it makes sense. There is so much daily hand-to-mouth here, so little beauty, so little luxury.

I hope they decide to grow their beautiful flowers in the end!

And the next step? We keep working on.

This project will take a long while, and as well as being potentially game-changing it’s also a chance for us to learn what works best.

Our first vision is that we can, in our community bokashi yard, take care of all the organic waste from the market. Every day. Month in, month out.

Our second vision is that we can, together, develop a form of social enterprise out of all this. Some form of “soil factory” where a valuable output is created that can be sold. Compost, fertiliser, small plants, fruit and vegetables. Whatever model makes best sense.

This way, the waste will be pulled through of it’s own accord. The story won’t be about waste management any more, because there won’t be any waste. It will be about using resources in the smartest possible way, making money, creating jobs, finding hope, growing food, making life more healthy and sustainable.

But still, the best part may just be the beautiful flowers.
I really hope there will be lots of them!

/Jenny from Bokashi Myanmar

The local community center. Relatively new and cosy inside, built by sponsors, and soon we hope it will soon become a green oasis.

This is the area we’ve now reclaimed to build a garden. Believe it or not. And the water pump is now on dry land!

See how we´re working! Collecting organic waste from the market

We’re on! Bokashi Myanmar is up and running

by Bokashi MyanmarSeptember 30, 2018October 22, 2018 4 Comments

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A lot of people are really upset about all the organic waste going to landfill here in Yangon.

Each time a council truck dumps its load of trash collected from the dumpsters of this megacity the stuff that pours out is predictable. One-third of the load is plastic and other non-degradable stuff. And the two-thirds is organic waste.

But organic waste should never be trash in the first place!

How come so much of it ends up at the tip?

We’ve spent the last three months working with this; our plan is to spend the next years changing the situation. Here, in Yangon, initially and later in the rest of Myanmar. To be honest, the whole of Asia is screaming out for a solution, but that’s more than we can get our head around just now.

We started Bokashi Myanmar this year with one big, wide vision. To stop organic waste going to landfill, or dumped in the river, or left to rot by the side of a road. And to start building healthy, fertile soil that can form the base for a whole new generation of urban gardening here in Yangon or any other city.

Our project started just under a year ago — with an idea, and a fledgling team. Bokashi is the name of the method we’re using: it’s a Japanese concept, based on fermentation, proven over several decades, and a damn fine way of making soil. It’s quick, and easy, and cheap, but the best part is that it gets carbon into the soil where it belongs, and out of the atmosphere, where it doesn’t.

How are we so sure about all this? With my team in Sweden, I have been working with bokashi for over a decade and it is a very, very good method. Just the piece of the puzzle we’ve been looking for globally in terms of sorting out waste management for the future. And regenerating soil carbon in the smartest possible way at street level.

So a year ago we started forming our team. I’ll tell you more about who we are later (or you can check some of our earlier posts), but there are five of us, two from Myanmar and three Europeans. At this stage. Pretty soon we’ll be growing our team, plenty of people would like to work with us it seems.

We spent a month in Myanmar earlier this year, all of us, researching the project and scoping out how to best do it. We met a LOT of people on all fronts — business, waste, community, NGO, recycling, householders — and it was totally obvious that we should take a deep breath, gather our courage, and make this project a reality.

In July this year, we started.

Bokashi yard

Monsoon season, obviously. The ultimate challenge in terms of making soil, starting a garden, organising anything. But we survived, and it was fine. Everything worked!

Our first step was to start a bokashi yard. A place we could have our headquarters, test all our ideas, create a demonstration site where we could show and tell and train. Produce the products we need, and start a rudimentary shop.

Clearly, with all the rain involved, we needed a roof over our heads too. Somewhere to duck in until the rain passed, organise our production and our paperwork, and have a beer after a long days work.

We found the perfect place — after some months of looking for something that would work at a price we could afford — in the northern outskirts of Yangon. North Dagon, Ward 45. It’s a normal house on a normal plot of land on a normal street in a suburban area. Close to the bus route but quiet as anything — birds and butterflies, nice neighbours and no cars. Ideal. We even have a bunch of wild cows that wander up and down the road foraging on the verges!

The garden was neat and nice — but basically just a yard full of sand with a few trees. The whole area used to be rice paddies once, which means it is submerged every monsoon. The problem is solved by those people that can afford it by filling their site with sand. So our yard is relatively well-drained (good!) but is basically a desert with almost a meter deep of sand (a challenge, to say the least).

The ultimate challenge for us and our ideas, actually, as we needed to prove — quickly — that we could create fertile soil using the waste we had around us and start a garden more or less immediately.

Emptying yet another barrel of fermented market waste into our sandy yard. Each and every layer makes the ground more fertile.

We succeeded

We started making bokashi directly. Barrels and barrels and barrels of it. We collected organic waste from our two local markets, from our neighbours, from the fruit shop on the corner. We fermented it all.

The process is simple, actually. We make a fermentation starter called bokashi bran out of rice bran and Effective Microorganisms (read more here) and molasses, and use that to ferment the food waste.

We give each barrel a week or two to ferment, then dig it down. This is our basic method: the concept we plan to spread throughout the country. Collect, ferment, dig down, grow. The whole process, start to finish, takes just two or three weeks. And it is possible to handle huge amounts of organic waste in this simple way.

The fermented bokashi can be used in a number of ways. We have one method for people living in apartments, another for people living in houses with yards, another for community projects and urban farmers.

The method we’re working with most, just now, is the latter. We’ve set up a corner to demonstrate the first two methods, but the real challenge is how to process big quantities of food waste in relatively small spaces. In effect, we are developing compost farms that can be scaled from very small scale to very big.

Actually, we were really lucky to have a visit from a New Zealand woman, Claire Mummery, in the middle of all this testing. Clair has worked with large-scale bokashi for many years in vineyard restaurants in NZ and has developed an excellent method that she shared with us.

It means we can get 200-300 liters of fermented organic waste down into a small area of just a couple of square meters. Where previously we were layering with soil (or in our case, sand, as we have no soil), Claire showed us how to layer with carbon. So now we dig deep trenches a meter or so deep, and alternate layers of coconut husks, brown leaves, shredded newspaper and rice husk with our fermented organic waste, or bokashi.

In terms of soil-building, this is optimal, as the brown materials have a higher carbon content than the fruit and vegetable waste, which have more nitrogen. We top off these deep beds, filled with the most amazing nutrients, with a layer of sand.

One week later we can start planting.

This is unheard of in the gardening world.

Normally compost is something that takes months and years, not just a couple of weeks. Bokashi is fast, but the magic is that you don’t have to wait for all the materials to turn into soil before you start planting in them. The first week or so the mix is a bit acidic, but after that it’s fine — and the fermentation has prepared the nutrients in such a way that the plants can take them up immediately.

Actually, a very convenient win-win solution. We get rid of our waste fast, and we can start growing in it fast.

This means that the time from a pineapple or cabbage being discarded at market until a new tomato or mango is planted in the mixture is just a couple of weeks. And the new plant will have all the nutrition it needs to grow big and strong, and produce new fruit and vegetables.

Amazing.

Making bokashi bran. By hand, at the moment. We’ll improve our efficiency as we go.

So this is what we’re doing in our bokashi yard.

We’re currently processing 60-100 liters of organic waste per day in our small yard. Just to see if we can, and if it works. We’ve sorted out a few deals with the cabbage guy at the market, and the coconut guy, and with the fruit woman too, and there is a squad of local trishaw riders who more than happily deliver it all to us at going rates.

All this experimentation is giving us confidence in what we’re doing. We’re getting some good flows going, and learning how to streamline our, admittedly, small-scale process.

Next step is to scale it up a notch. So we’re looking for a new, and bigger yard, not too far away where we can start up more of a process line. We hope to add a coconut crusher to the input end, and a roofed area where we can work, some proper space for all our incoming and outgoing materials.

We’re arranging with companies and others to get in our raw materials — organic waste, mainly — and will develop a range of different compost and fertiliser products as our output. For people that want to do all this themselves, we will structure up our training and demos and share our methods.

That’s our bokashi yard, version 1.0. We are really pleased, and excited about what our yard 2.0 will bring.

Meanwhile, we have a couple of other projects underway — same idea but in communities where this type of solution is so badly needed.

Tell you more about that in the next post!

/Jenny from Bokashi Myanmar

We run our office Myanmar style. Meetings on the floor, at our low table. In our work clothes. And usually we make our guests do a bit of digging too!

Making bokashi part two:

by Bokashi MyanmarJuly 27, 2018July 27, 2018 Leave a comment

We’re making our first barrel of kitchen bokashi here and honestly, it’s this easy. We’re just putting it in the barrel, adding some bokashi bran to start the fermentation, putting on the lid and that’s it.
We’ll leave it to ferment for a couple of weeks behind the house, then make soil and start planting our new garden.
We’ll be doing demos and courses when we get a bit more organised, come join us then!
/Jenny and Inda, Bokashi Myanmar

#bokashimyanmar #bokashi #makesoil #organicwaste #nomorelandfill

Making kitchen bokashi, Part One

by Bokashi MyanmarJuly 26, 2018July 27, 2018 Leave a comment

Join us as we make our first barrel of bokashi here in our office-yard!
We brought home some sacks of organic waste from the local market and are putting it in a barrel to ferment for a couple of weeks. After that we’ll mix it with local soil (=sand) and prepare to plant our new garden.
It’s way easier than you would think, and fast too!
/Jenny and Inda, Bokashi Myanmar

#bokashimyanmar #makingbokashi #organicwaste #soeasy

Tea leaves = fertiliser

by Bokashi MyanmarMay 25, 2018June 15, 2018 Leave a comment

(ေအာက္မွာျမန္မာလိုပါေသးတယ္ေနာ္)

Here’s an inspiring story.
On a spare corner of a community wasteland (=dump, basically) in Mandalay this guy is drying used tea leaves. He collects them from local tea shops on a regular basis and brings them here to dry.
Then he packs them all up in rice sacks and sells them as fertilser.
It’s a micro business but it’s a genius idea, so much more of this would be needed.
/Jenny

ေဟာဒီမွာဗ်ာ…စိတ္အားတက္ႂကြေစမယ့္ဇာတ္လမ္းေလးတစ္ပုဒ္။
ရပ္ကြက္ကလူေတြ အမိႈက္ပစ္ၾကတဲ့ေနရာရဲ႕ ေထာင့္တေထာင့္မွာ ဒီလူႀကီးက သံုးၿပီးသားအခ်ိဳေျခာက္ေတြကို ေနလွန္းေနရဲ႕။
ရပ္ကြက္လၻက္ရည္ဆိုင္ေလးေတြကေန ပံုမွန္သြားသြားယူလာၿပီး ဒီမွာေနလာလွန္းတယ္။
တစ္ခ်ိဳ႕ဆိုင္ေတြကဖရီးတဲ့။တစ္ခ်ိဳ႕က်လဲ၂၀၀၀ေလာက္ေပးရသတဲ့။တစ္ပတ္ကိုမွပါ။
အေျခာက္လွမ္းၿပီးသားေတြကို ဆာလာအိတ္ထဲထည့္ၿပီး၊ ျခင္ေဆးေခြလုပ္တဲ့ေနရာမွာရယ္၊ ေျမဩဇာအျဖစ္ရယ္ ျပန္ေရာင္းသတဲ့။
ဒီစီးပြားေရးေလးက တကယ့္ေသးေသးေလးပါ။ သို႔ေသာ္ တကယ့္အၾကံေကာင္းေလး။ ဒီလို အိုင္ဒီယာ နဲ႔ လုပ္နည္းေတြ ပိုပိုမ်ားလာဖို႔ လိုတယ္။

#bokashimyanmar #foodwaste #sustainablemyanmar #makessomuchsense

Kindness not plastic.

by Bokashi MyanmarMay 24, 2018June 15, 2018 Leave a comment

( 😊ေအာက္မွာျမန္မာလိုပါေသးတယ္ေနာ္ )

Feeding animals with kindness not plastic! This is from our friend Lee in India, he showed us how people leave their food waste outside their houses for the cows, goats and dogs. Nice and neat, no other rubbish.
We can make bokashi out of food waste, or any kind of organic waste really, but the animals should always get the best bits!
/Jenny

ၾကင္ၾကင္နာနာနဲ႔ တိရစၦာန္ေလးေတြကို အစာေကြၽးေနတာ။ ပလပ္စတစ္ေတာ့မပါ။ ဒီဗီဒီယိုေလးကို ေလာေလာဆည္ အိႏၵိယ ႏိုင္ငံမွာေရာက္ေနတဲ့ က်မတို႔မိတ္ေဆြႀကီး Lee ပို႔ေပးတာပါ။
ေခြး၊ ႏြား၊ ဆိတ္ စတဲ့သတၱဝါေလးေတြအတြက္ လူေတြက စားစရာအက်န္ေလးေတြ၊ စြန္႔ပစ္ပစၥည္းေတြကို သူတို႔အိမ္ေတြအျပင္ဘက္မွာ စုပံုထားေပးထားတာကိုျပခ်င္တာပါ။
ေကာင္းမြန္သပ္ရပ္ပါတယ္။ တျခားအမိႈက္လည္းမပါပါဘူး။
အစားအေသာက္အႂကြင္းအက်န္ေတြကေနေရာ၊ တျခားဩဂဲနစ္ စြန္႔ပစ္ပစၥည္းေတြကေနပါ က်မတို႔ ဘိုကာ႐ွီ ျပဳလုပ္ႏိုင္ပါတယ္။ သို႔ေသာ္ အဲဒါေတြထဲက ေကာင္းတာေလးေတြကိုေတာ့ တိရစာၦန္ေလးေတြ စားရေစခ်င္တာက်မတို႔ ေစတနာအမွန္ပါ။

#bokashimyanmar #bokashi #foodwaste #noplastic

Flash flood and all the debris.

by Bokashi MyanmarMay 22, 2018June 15, 2018 Leave a comment

(ေအာက္မွာျမန္မာလိုပါေသးတယ္ေနာ္ )

We were caught in a flash flood one day and were surprised by all the palm leaves and other branches and leaves that suddenly filled the streets. The little orange waste container didn’t stand a chance!
Municipal workers were surprisingly quick on the scene and kept the traffic flowing.
But I’m assuming all that ”green waste” went to landfill not compost. Pity.
/Jenny

တရက္သား က်မတို႔အဖြဲ႔. မိုးရြာၿပီး လမ္းေတြ ႐ုတ္တရက္ ေရလွ်ံတာနဲ႔ ၾကံဳရတယ္။ ရန္ကုန္မွာေပါ့။ လမ္းမေပၚ ထန္းလက္ေျခာက္ေတြ၊ တျခားအကိုင္းအခပ္ အရြက္ေပါင္းစံုနဲ႔ ရႈပ္ပြသြားလို႔ အံ႔ဩမိရေသး။
လိေမၼာ္ေရာင္ အမိႈက္ပံုးေလးလဲ အခြင့္မသာလိုက္။ ျမဴနီစီပယ္ လုပ္သားေတြ အံ႔ဩစရာေကာင္းေလာက္ေအာင္ျမန္ျမတ္ေရာက္လာၿပီး လမ္း႐ွင္းေပးၾကတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ အဲဒိ စိမ္းစိမ္းလန္းလန္းပစၥည္းေတြအကုန္ အမိႈက္ထဲပဲေရာက္ၾကမွာ။ ရြက္ေဆြးေျမဩဇာလုပ္ၾကမွာ မဟုတ္ေလာက္ဘူးလို႔ က်မေတာ့ထင္မိ။

#bokashimyanmar #landfill #yangon #compost

How EM works

by Bokashi MyanmarMay 21, 2018 Leave a comment

Lactic acid bacteria, yeast and phototrophic bacteria contained in EM-1 have the ability to ferment organic substances. Compost fermented and decomposed by EM is broken down in the soil and absorbed by plants. Also, EM contains many useful components to promote plant growth.

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