I have a little garden space in front of the patio on my ground floor flat and the food bin for the whole block is annoyingly far away. Okay fine it’s only a one minute walk and I’m out there often enough with my regular bins. But I decided to look into composting my food myself, and stumbled across the popular combination of bokashi bins to ferment my food waste, soil factories to make it usable, and a wormery to make lovely vermicular compost, aka ‘black gold’.

After much research (I like to research the crap out of any prospective purchase) I’ve settled on:

• two Organko 2.0 bokashi bins from Wiggly Wigglers
• a bunch of Strata 42L plastic storage boxes with secure lids, from Wickes
• and a Wormcity wormery from, um, Wormcity

Quick assessment of it all now it’s arrived and in use:

I picked the Organko 2.0 bokashi bins because they look a bit nicer than the usual functional buckets with lids, which look pretty ugly and I guess I like nicely designed stuff. They were very, very expensive compared to the usual sorts of bins, and now they’re here I really don’t know why they cost almost twice as much as the uglier ones.

It’s literally just one tall wide cylindrical plastic container with another slightly shallower one inside with holes in the bottom to let the juice out. The lids just sit on top completely loose, they don’t clip shut or anything although there is a rubber-rimmed circular tool that I think you’re meant to use to form an airtight seal over your compressed food waste. Unfortunately it certainly feels like it’s going to split down the middle after a few weeks, but let’s see how long it lasts in real use.

The spout at the bottom is far less functional than the tap-like spouts on others. It’s just a spigot you unscrew a quarter turn, but you have to tip the bucket back before you open it, then tip it forward to get the liquid.

So overall the Organko 2.0 bins look much nicer than the usual bokashi bins available, but as they’re so massive they’re both in a cupboard under the sink anyway. So if you don’t care about looks, but still want to buy a set of bins instead of making your own, you’re probably absolutely fine with the much cheaper ones. Oh well, it’s done now!

The 42L boxes and lids I got are for dumping the bokashi ferment into a box with roughly 2-3 times as much used soil, mixing it all up, sealing the lid, and leaving it for 4 weeks to turn into usable soil. This is because bokashi ferment isn’t usable yet as it’s so acidic – not a great idea to feed it to the worms either. So you’re meant to dump it in with used soil for a few weeks to neutralise and get broken down further into compost.

The 42L Strata boxes from Wickes are a good size with tall vertical sides that will be easy to fill up and mix soil inside of. Really strong plastic. Then the lids have two sturdy clips that lift up from the sides of the boxes and close over the lip of the box on both sides. These also seem really strong – the lids and the clips.

But on top of that two opposing corners of the box and lid have holes you can put a padlock through if you wanted – I’m using thick reusable cable ties so that I can leave the boxes outside loaded with bokashi and soil and know the local foxes won’t be able to get into them.

Then the Wormcity wormery is the best bit. I chose this because it’s designed and made in Britain using high quality recycled plastic, very highly regarded by authorities like Gardeners World, and I wanted to support a British company. The next best reviewed wormery by Gardeners World is called the cylindrical and equally modular Wormbox. However, the Wormbox is a French product, that you have to order from France, and I didn’t really fancy that. It does look quite nice, and it’s as expandable as the Wormcity, but it’s also ever so slightly wider than the Wormcity. So I went British.

The Wormcity is fab. I got four trays so I can expand into it across the next year, but for now one is all you need. It comes with a brick of coir bedding that you soak in water to get ready, plus some worm food to keep them going (you don’t feed them actual food for a few weeks while they settle in), and a 500g bag of wriggling worms!

I also chucked in a sheet of corrugated cardboard (from the box it came in) under the bedding, plus a few handfuls of used soil and compost with the bedding itself, then more shredded moist cardboard on top, all as per the instructions.

Overnight I kept it indoors with the lid off and a Hue lightbulb on, shining at the bedding so they burrow down rather than climbing out. This is apparently the fool-proof way to keep them happy on the first few nights while they’re getting used to their new home, otherwise they can often try to escape once night falls.

But mine seem very happy in their bedding-plus-used-soil, with plenty of cardboard and airflow, and just enough moisture.

So the plan is, load up one bokashi bin over a few weeks with food waste. When it’s full let it ferment for another few weeks while I fill up the second bin.

When the first bin is fermented, mix it through with 2-3 times its weight in used soil and compost in one of the Strata 42L boxes, seal the lid on, and leave it for another 3-4 weeks

In the meantime once my worms are settled I’ll start feeding them select bits of ‘fresh’ food waste instead of putting it in the bokashi bins – stuff like lettuce, eggshell, coffee grounds, etc – just to get them going on real food. I’ll still be using the bokashi bins for most of my waste, especially because worms have a selective diet and don’t really want stuff like lemons, garlic, or meat. So that’ll still go into the bokashi bins, which can take just about everything for fermenting purposes.

Once a soil factory box has finished working about four weeks later, start adding that in small doses to the wormery, and using the rest as top dressing around the garden. At that point a second bokashi bin will likely be ready so it goes into a new soil factory box, and repeat.

Aaaaand that’s the cycle. Probably won’t see results from the soil factories for at least a few months (2-3 weeks to fill a bokashi bin, 2-3 weeks to ferment a full bin, at least 4 weeks in a soil factory box), and about the same for the wormery – won’t see much usable black gold from the first tray for at least 2-3 months if not longer. But once they get going, should be plenty of lovely food for my plants and garden!