Bokashi System

I'm already on to my second bucket of Bokashi compost, and looking forward to digging in the results from the first into my Hugelkultur mound in good time to plant pumpkins etc on top.  Bokashi is a system developed in Japan and has a reputation for quickly breaking down food scraps and other waste in a short time.

The kit I bought consists of 2 bins and some starter bran along with a scattering of accessories.  I also bought some starter culture so I can make up some of the bran myself when it's warm enough outside to dry it.

The bin sits in the kitchen and I tip in the accumulated waste (including all the paper towel) in the morning and evening.  The process is anaerobic and the advice is not to open the airtight lid more than a few times a day.  The bokashi culture consists of a mix of micro-organisms that cure the compost.  There's two bins because when you fill one you let it rest while you fill the other (2 weeks, which is about spot on so far), and then you bury the compost in soil to finish breaking down.  As such the in-bucket part isn't really composting, but pickling.  The claim is that the result composts quickly and produces a micro-organism set that plants appreciate.

The little tape at the bottom of the bin is to drain off the liquid produced during composting,  This 'tea' can be diluted with water and used as a plant feed.  I'm also going to try adding it to the composting toilet mix.

Portable gas stove

Cooking on an outdoor fire or a woodstove is a luxurious process, but not always what we need here for a quick cup of tea or for getting something to eat onto the table quickly after a long day out.  So to supplement the stove in the kitchen we have a set of gas stoves, ranging from a small hiking stove to a large standalone campingaz setup I don't intend to use until its warm enough to set up an outdoor kitchen.  In this review I'm going to introduce the smallest stove, which does just fine for boiling water or heating a frying pan.  It's in daily use at the moment, starting first thing every day with a pot of coffee.

I bought the stove last year for a cycling trip and its not marked with any branding, but I've found it for sale online here.  It's more efficient than my larger (and more stable) 'truckers' model from my van days.  For camping and cycling trips it's ideal because it folds up small in its own little plastic box and can take the rough and tumble of being packed into the rest of the luggage well.    You can choose which size gas canister to bring with it and also trust that (in most of Europe at least) you'll be able to find somewhere that sells compatible gas cannisters reasonably cheap.  Here in Sweden I've discovered that Biltema is very economic.

So it's fairly economic, very portable and can hand a single pot, frying pan or kettle at a time.  That sometimes means thinking carefully about sequencing and for example boiling pasta first and then leaving it to finish cooking in the hot water while I cook a sauce in a separate pan.  That's not a problem though, and if it is then I have other gas stoves.  I've also found it very useful to get a meal going while the wood stove heats up and then switching over to that once its warm enough.

The thing I don't like about this stove so much is the stability.  I use it on the kitchen table on top of an old wood cutting board, and of course it means looking at that I don't knock it over while I'm cooking.  I live in a wooden house and its not hard to imagine the whole thing falling over, the table catching fire and soon the house gone.  Maybe its a bit nuts to use it like that, but the same issue of stability is important when camping with the added fun that you're usually at ground level, physically tired and perhaps cold enough to be clumsy.  Maybe you don't lose a house, but it's easy to lose your pack, a whole lot of forest or your life, so the main thing is that it shouldn't be so easy to knock over.

This one is fairly good when it's standing still, but the folding legs have an annoying habit of folding as soon as the stove is moved.  Or sometimes just when the gas bottle is shifted. It's not a necessarily fatal flaw, but it is something to be aware of.

The other flaw now that I've used it nearly a year is that the piezoelectric ignitor no longer lights the gas.  It sparks just fine, but I can't seem to get it into the right place to set the gas on fire like it used to.  I use matches instead, but its (minor) irritation.

Nomad Guide 10 Plus Solar Kit - first review

I've had this Nomad Guide 10 Plus Solar Kit for a couple of weeks now, and so far I'm impressed.  The kit consists of a rechargeable battery pack (The Nomad Guide 10), along with Goal Zero's Nomad 7  Solar Panel.  The battery pack gives you a 2300 mAh USB battery pack, based on 4 AA batteries which you can take out and use separately.  It also has an adapter which allows you to charge AAA batteries, which I'm going to try next to charge batteries for our head torches - I don't want to be throwing away non-rechargeables all the time as they're expensive and even though there 's a recycling stream to feed them into in Sweden I don't imagine it's very good for the environment.

The solar panel is very effectively, feeding charge directly to a mobile phone even on a cloudy day in February just shy of 57 degrees North.  I'm impressed by the build quality and the thought given to it as a package.  It all folds up into a package the size of slim book, and clicks shut with a magnetic in a convincing way. There are a bunch of small loops around the edge so it's been easy to hang in a Southern window for charging. All the accessories fit into a zipped pouch, where they can sit and work while everything is charging as well as for storage. I'd want to have a look at what is poking out before I transported it like this, but I can see it would be a great little setup to have along on a cycling or canoeing trip, and might even be light enough for hiking if it was important to be able to charge a phone/tablet/mobile internet set up.

I'm looking forward to seeing how well it runs over time, but so far very encouraging.