HozelockKitchen Composter Bokashi 10L : Kitchen Composter with Fermentation Activator (1 Kg), Airtight and Odorless, Recovers Liquid Fertiliser [4193 0000]

but very pleasantly surprised. Essentially, it's a plastic box with a lid and a tap. The clever bit seems to be the bran you get with it, that anaerobically breaks down the contents of your bin to create a liquid fertiliser. Guess what? That's what it actually does. Been using it now for about three months, and have had about 2 litres of home made fertiliser juice from it.The solid waste gets dug into the garden, the liquid fertiliser feeds house and garden plants, and I get to smile smugly for doing my bit to save the planet. Every little helps.

A present for Christmas. Looks a really good product

Using the composter for 5 weeks.Easy to setup, even easier to use and doing just what it says on the packet, very efficiently.Storing the resultant liquid and not used yet but as a fertiliser I hope it is as good as the composter itself

Excellent product- this is my second. I fill one, let it ferment for a couple of weeks whilst filling the second. Virtually all our food waste goes through these bins

When it arrived first it needed some time to make it airtight but lated it adjusted itself.

They said o garden? Noproblem! But they're wrong!! After the month long production of the liquor, the solids have to bedisposed of! Really? Where pray tell if one does not have a garden!?! Carry it out and in the car to a suitable field, dig a hole, say a few prayers and bury it? Chuck it over the first fence and run like mad!? Post it back to hoselock!, ? What DOES one do with the mortal remains?Good idea badly thought out and grossly missold to flat and backyard only dwellers!

We have door step food waste collections - for which the council have supplied a small indoor caddy for the kitchen and a larger bin for doorstep collections. If you’re familiar with this sort of setup, this Hozelock Bokashi Composter is roughly the size of the larger doorstep bin. The instructions do suggest however that it’s better to keep the Bokashi Composter inside: the composter bucket could get damaged by frost and the elements, and apparently the whole composting process works better at room temperature. This Bokashi Composter is supplied with a 1KG bag of Bran - I’ve found that a 2KG bag is a little over a tenner to buy. In combination with the sealed air-tight composter bucket, the Bran encourages the composting process to develop quickly and encourages friendly bacteria which stops the whole thing from stinking out your kitchen. To get started you simply line the bottom of the composter bucket with Bran and then you can start putting your kitchen waste in. Pretty much anything goes, although it composts more effectively if you chop it up into smaller pieces first: fruit and veg, citrus peels, cooked and raw meat, fish, cheese, yoghurt, eggs, bread - you get the idea. The only things it specifically says to avoid are liquids such as vinegar, juice, milk and larger bones. At the end of each day, I squish down the food scraps using the plastic tool supplied and when there’s a reasonably amount in there I sprinkle some more Bran on the top. It’s important that you keep the lid properly sealed except when you’re emptying scraps into it. it’s like a large tupperware tub lid and you you need both hands to peel it back and reseal it. You can’t smell the food waste at all once it’s in the sealed composter bucket, although the Bran has a distinctive smell which lingers in the kitchen when you’ve used it.At the bottom of the composter bucket is a little tap. Once in regular use (and active micro-organisms have formed inside the composter bucket) you can draw a liquid fertiliser from here every 3 to 5 days. When you first start out though it takes a good few weeks before you can draw anything at all. I was into my third week before even a trickle of liquid came out, by which time the composter bucket was nearly full (we’re a large family). When the composter bucket is full you need to leave everything for an additional two weeks before - to give it the correct name - the digestate is ready to be used, either by simply burying it in the ground or by using it to enrich the compost in your traditional outdoor composter. You can’t place it directly on plants or roots straight out of the composter bucket.I had no real experience of a Bokashi composter before trying this Hozelock Pure model. I thought it was going to be a big thing sat in the garden that would allow me to enjoy free compost and fertiliser simply by emptying my food scraps into it. It requires a little more commitment than that. It is a much smaller unit than I was expecting, but for something that’s supposed to sit in your kitchen or utility room, it still takes up quite a bit of space. It’s also a much more involved process than I was expecting - you need to keep chopping up the food scraps, squishing them down and adding more bran. I’ve just filled the composter bucket for the first time, and I’ve used most of the Bran supplied, maybe I’ve used too much? I think I’ve followed the instructions pretty well. The resulting digestate still looks pretty much like food scraps, but according to the instructions it’s been “chemically changed”. I’m now back using my council food waste bucket whilst I wait for a couple of weeks for the digestate to be ready to use. At this stage the eco warrior in my is ploughing on, but to be honest the tired father of three is thinking about how easy it is to let the council take my food waste away.

The ‘Hozelock Bokashi Composter’ is a handy compact-sized composter for recycling food waste and the like, and to give you great fertiliser for your garden / vegetable patch.The first thing that I should really point out about the composter, is it requires a sort of “commitment” to using. What I mean by this is, it’s something that’s designed to be kept indoors, constantly in use (i.e. adding food waste on a daily basis), and the compost it creates used regularly.For those with suitable gardens and lifestyles for this, it probably is a composter that’s worth considering. For those who aren’t quite able to commit to such a lifestyle, and having a composter kept in the house, then it might be worth thinking carefully before investing in one of these.To be honest, me and the kids tried our best with this, to keep on top of it, and use the compost on the garden. The “liquid plant feed” it produces is a great idea. It was handy to then feed the plants with, which seemed to really take to this natural plant feed.The thing is, the composter just took up so much room in the house, it was cumbersome to use, the vegetable matter inside started to smell a bit due to the warmth in the house etc. In fact, after a couple of months of use, I found the thing to be more a curse than a blessing and so relegated it to the back of the shed.It wasn’t for me basically. Well, at this point in my life – recently divorced, with a busy work life and looking after ten-year-old twins – I found I just didn’t have the time to keep on top of the composter. I like the idea of it, but you have to really be good with being on top of these things, to have it work for you.