I’m getting back into this whole writing thing, so I thought I’d start a new series. One I’ll probably find challenging: gardening. It’s currently the middle of winter in the UK, so not exactly the best time to be tidying up the garden, but this is more of a plan for the year ahead.
Enter: Trowel & Terminal
Combining physical gardening with sensors, automations, and data.
Eventually, I’ll get round to setting up Home Assistant, but as you’ve probably guessed, time is at a premium. So I’m starting small, and doing things regularly.
Compost is honest work. Everything you toss in gets broken down: peels, coffee grounds, scraps, the bits you overlook. It doesn’t rush, and it doesn’t judge. Over time, what was waste becomes soil. That’s not just nature running its course; it’s a protocol for renewal.
In systems thinking, we’re always trying to track the flow: inputs, transformations, outputs. We debug when something goes wrong. We optimise when it goes right. But nature has been running stable releases of complex systems for billions of years. Composting is one of its most elegant background processes.
I recently read (well, listened to the audiobook of) Thinking In Systems and may have done a bit of a deep dive. It’s all quite philosophical.
Compost is a lot like garbage collection in software. You build your programme, and eventually unused objects accumulate. In computing, the garbage collector reclaims memory. In nature, composting reclaims nutrients. Both are invisible to the user until something breaks. Then, suddenly, you notice: lag, rot, inefficiency.
But composting does something software hasn’t quite nailed yet. It doesn’t just reclaim, it transforms. The breakdown is the breakthrough. Inputs aren’t erased; they’re recontextualised. A banana peel becomes nitrogen. Dead leaves become structure. That’s how forests run version updates: slow, silent integration of decay into growth.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to apply this mindset more literally. Our kitchen bin still overflows with food waste but thankfully we’re vegetarians, so smell isn’t a huge concern. But with bin collections now fortnightly, this is something we should be looking at more closely.
Bokashi: Composting 2.0
Bokashi isn’t composting in the traditional sense. It’s anaerobic digestion which is a fancy way of saying fermentation. And it’s incredibly efficient.
Here’s how it works:
- Collect your food waste (including cooked leftovers).
- Sprinkle microbe-rich bokashi bran over the scraps.
- Press it down, seal the container, and let the microbes do their work.
- Once the bin is full, you leave it to ferment for a couple of weeks. What you get is a kind of pickled pre-compost. Bury it in soil, and it transforms again. With the help of worms, fungi, and time.
What you’re left with isn’t just the absence of waste. You get enriched soil, and a small system loop that actually gives something back.
When we first moved into our place in the north of Manchester, we left the garden alone. Personally, I find a manicured lawn a bit depressing (why would you want just a single plant dominating your garden?) Anyway, we let things be, and now it’s rich with wild plants and flowers. It’s chaotic, yes, but alive. All of this contributes to healthy soil, which might actually be great for planting crops this year.
Composting as a Design Philosophy
Bokashi fits into this broader Thinking-In-Systems mindset: not just waste management, but protocol design.
If composting is the garbage collector, then bokashi is the early-stage refactorer. It takes the gnarly, hard-to-handle stuff and pre-processes it. It prepares the way for reintegration. It’s fast, compact, and mostly invisible. It handles what most systems ignore.
It’s the Thinking In Systems version of taking out the rubbish.
Bokashi@Home
I’m starting small. One bokashi bin under the sink. A bag of bran. A mindset shift.
It’s not a silver bullet. But it’s a signal: waste is just data we haven’t integrated yet. The banana peel, the half-eaten sandwich, the worn-out project idea, they’re not junk. They’re just waiting for the right container, the right process, the right transformation.
And that’s composting, at every level.
That’s the protocol.
Let things go. Let them break down.
And build fertile ground from what’s left.