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Maggots-
We needed brown matter to aide the decomposition so we got wood chips and leaves from large piles at school.  Little did we know, these piles were home to common house fly larvae.  They ended up in our compost.  Fortunately, fly larvae are just icky and not harmful to compost.  The only gross part was the smell for the one day that the larvae were alive inside Bokashi.  Then they died.  Everything is normal again.

Outside the contained passive compost

The crate of passive compost seemed to work well for Solebury until we realized it was attracting all sorts of pests.  A lot of the waste was scattered on the ground as crows, woodchucks, and dinosaurs made a feast of our biology project.

Week 3

Today is the penultimate day of school and our last biology class to work on this project.  Unfortunately we did not have enough time to assess the finished products of each type of composting; however, we did anticipate this and we will come to our conclusions based on the data we have now.

Pictures!

Contained passive

Black Box

Bokashi

As you can see, bokashi has come a long way.  It also picked up some maggots which made it smell absolutely rancid for about a day, but everything is back to normal now and the walls are just coated in baby fly corpses.

We will post our final analysis later today.



Week two

Week tw is coming to a close.  So far there are only pictures of us and Bokashi because William took the pictures (how dare you say that we favor Bokashi.  We love all of our children equally.)  We will add pictures of the passive and black box composters soon. (They don't look much different).

Adding brown matter

Sasha tells a story.  Hannah looks scornfully at the ground.

It's like bonding over a campfire, but better and smellier.

Baby Bokashi is growing up!!

This week went really well.  We had a whole load of compost to sort out; it was awesome.  It's totally because we stood by the compost bins during lunch, rewarding composters with cookies and stickers.  In the words of Anthony, "cookies work for everything".  It also rained a lot this week so once things start to dry out we'll need to add more dry carbon matter (leaves, grass clippings).

Week 1

Well, here we are at the end of week one.  Really it's only been a day, but today is Friday...

Bokashi

Black Box

Passive

Note that the ratio of green:brown material is a little off... In order to get the Bokashi going we needed to fill the bottom with quick-decomposing matter so we had a bunch of leaves to deal with.  The ratio will balance out as necessary as the project continues.

Also, one of us accidentally left the bag of bokashi culture mix outside overnight and a woodchuck thought it would be a tasty snack.  After tearing open the bag she discovered that it tasted like weird bacteria so didn't eat any but left it scattered on the ground.  It was fun to clean up.  I love you, nature.

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The "Black box" composter

The passive composting bin

Sasha mixing the compost with perfect form.

Teamwork!