After working in
boots all day, I must admit, I develop a rather delicious form of "funk-foot"... Lovely, I know, but it's the truth.. I discovered this method after soaking my feet in neem cake, powdered, and diluted in
water. After a couple soakings, and some supplemental aeration, we had lift off! Logically, I then bought neem tooth paste, and what my old man used to call "Alpo breath", was a thing of the past!
Anyways, though graphic, I felt it necessary to preface this with my deep seeded (pun probably intended) appreciation and use of- the neem tree.
I wanted to genuinely say hello to you all, as this is my very first posting on any forum anywhere, and I am just familiarizing myself with this whole internet forum thing.. I have been bokashi'ing all food scraps for about a year, and feeding the fermented material directly to my worms... I consider myself to be generally new to the whole
permaculture paradigm, and absolutely LOVE it. I have learned of this method due to personal bucket failure, or what I like to call a "funky-bucket". If you do bokashi, you know what I am talking about
...This might be for people who already have this material laying around, or who can source it cheaply and locally.... neem cake. If you have funky (smelling) bokashi buckets, you may use neem cake... aka neem
seed meal.. Powder it using a
coffee grinder if you want to increase surface area. You can use this as a preventative measure, or if you have the beginning of a "funky" bucket, or even one that has been "funki-fying" for some time now, you can apply about a 1/2 inch layer of neem cake to the bottom of the bucket or bin that catches the "bokashi juice", or bokashi liquid. And then leave it... Don't dump it out or anything. You can leave the neem cake in there for the entire cycle of the bucket to completely control smell and to absorb moisture. I can safely say this puts adding sugar to the bottom of your bucket to control smell, "out of the water". It might cost more, but the versatility of neem cake in your garden is astounding, even in very minute amounts... Hopefully this helps someone avoid getting to the point where "slime" is even a factor.... namaste