Soil mites in bikashi soil factory
Anna asked 2 years ago
I live in an apartmenbt and finishing the composting process on a balcony in a bif bucket with a lid whixh is not 100% germetical. Thurd time in a row (as temperutares are higher now) when i open it I see tons of soil mites). After I thoughroughly mix the soil i probably have about 10 in a cm2. I understand they are ok if the soil is used outside, but i do not want to use this soil onside due to possible health hazard. Why do they come and how I get id of them? Thanks
Nicki Casley Staff answered 2 years ago
You can make this better by changing the ratio of bokashi precompost to soil in your soil factory. The soil factory can easily get overwhelmed if you put too much bokashi precompost in there. The limited size of a soil factory means that there are only so many microorganisms in there to process the bokashi precompost…
So… try either putting a lot less bokashi precompost in there next time, or add a significantly larger amount of garden soil in there. Either should reduce your problem. And if the problem is bad now, you may want to consider starting again from scratch.
And, be sure to add healthy garden soil, not any story bought soils as those are sterile and void of life. You want as much life in there as possible to fuel the soil building process (a teaspoon of healthy garden soil contains many billions of microbes!)