Gardening, Composting, Bokashi Oh My!

Since I’ve opened the door to gardening, my head is swimming! For a while, I had a hard time putting the horse before the cart.

Here’s My Dilemma

My natural personality is to go superlative. If I’m going to garden, I want to grow my veggies from seeds and plant them in organic, nutrient-rich soil. I want to have some sort of control as to what is going into my soil and subsequently into the vegetables that will be feeding my family.

To accomplish the goal of healthy nutrient-rich vegetables, ideally, I’d like to use soil from my compost and nutrient-rich bokashi soil. I think that would give me the best results.

My Gardening Reality

In reality, I live in the Northeast and the weather is still subject to occasional frost. I haven’t started my compost pile (there’s the subject of another post), nor has my bokashi mix been delivered. Even if I were to make my own bokashi mix it takes two weeks of fermenting before the mix is effective and an additional 2 weeks before I can hope to have bokashi tea for fertilizing. Therefore, I’ve got to come up with plan B for this year.

Vegetable Garden Plan B

Being that I have yet to set up my self-watering containers, or plant veggie seedlings to eventually transfer to the yet-to-be-set-up gardening containers, I’m a bit behind the 8 ball.

All is not lost, however. I can still set up my containers and grow vegetables this year, but they won’t come from seedlings, nor will my initial gardening container consist of self-composted soil. I’ll have to get my soil from the local gardening store, and fertilize the soil using composting and bokashi tea as the season progresses.

Growing Experiment

A blogger over at Crazy about Compost performed an experiment where he grew basil in 5 different types of soil. Four of the pots had composted soil and the control was plain old yard soil. Unfortunately, bokashi soil didn’t make it into his experiment.

The results showed that no matter which type of compost you use, plants grow hardier and healthier with composted soil. I’m just hoping that as I fertilize the soil with my compost tea during the growing season, I’ll see healthy results.

You see, I have a brown thumb (literally and figuratively) so the odds are stacked against me. It’s a good thing that I never pay attention to the odds.  🙂

And the saga continues…