Scentless!

Little organic waste container
Originally uploaded by Jaydot

This is my little organic waste container.
I wish you could step into my kitchen and have a quick sniff - you would smell nothing... And that is amazing.
This little container sits on my kitchen countertop, and it catches all sorts of organic waste during the day: apple peels, teabags, leftovers from cutting up veggies, that sort of stuff. It doesn't usually smell very much, because I empty it practically every day (into the Bokashi bucket now, formerly onto the compost heap).
However, I keep a piece of folded kitchen towel at the bottom to soak up liquids and sometimes this gets stuck to the bottom and remains in situ for days. And at times, that will start stinking to high heaven. A really foul rotting garbage stench.
Which happened yesterday evening.
This time, instead of hastily getting rid of the sodden paper at the bottom and cleaning the container, I tipped in some of the liquid I had just drained off my Bokashi bucket. About a tablespoon of it. And left the kitchen, it was bedtime anyway.
This morning I didn't take much notice of the container (I'm usually in a bit of a hurry in the mornings), but this evening it was the first thing I noticed: No Smell! No smell whatsoever. Wow!
This whole good guys/bad guys microbe theory actually works!

With all the reading I'm now doing on the subject of microbes, I understand it starts stinking when the "bad guys" take over. In his book An Earth Saving Revolution, Dr. Higa puts it like this:

There are two dynamic and opposing forces existing within nature. These may be
described in the broadest terms by the characteristic way in which they affect
the world around them as the forces of regeneration and degeneration. The
former, the force of regeneration, characteristically endows all things with
life and vitality, and supports and maintains wholeness, soundness and good
health. It is productive, beneficial and vital. In other words, it is the life
force. In opposition to this, degeneration is the dynamic of destruction: it
engenders breakdown, instigates and advances decay and decomposition, pollution
and contamination, causing sickness and disease and, ultimately, death. It is
counter productive, pathogenic and necrotic. Recent research is only just now
coming to understand what lies behind both these forces, and what it is that
instigates, governs and drives them. Both of them are generated and totally
under the domination of some of the tiniest life forms we know, organisms so
minute they are invisible to the naked eye. The control of regeneration and
degeneration lies in the grasp of the miniscule creatures know collectively as
microorganisms.

Whereas the Bokashi, and consequently the liquid that comes out of the Bokashi bucket, is teeming with good guys.