So my ICRP consists of me working (both farmwork and academic work) on Fair Earth Farm, a 3-rai experiment in how far a certain tract of land can go/how much food it can produce, using no chemicals or unnatural additives. I think my project might be to draw up a comprehensive map/biodiversity survey of the Farm, but this week I've just been getting my bearings, working with Pi Isert, the hired hand, and awkwardly navigating yet another host family situation, which is really really fun except that my host mom's mom died on tuesday night, and tonight is night 4 of a five-day funeral, which has sort of swept the village, involving everyone and every chair within walking distance. Also, probably every sunflower seed.
So here's a little bit of what I've been writing/doing!! Next week I'll try to keep it more up to date......
Everything about rattan (white thorn in particular, but really every species) is a little cruel. Not only is every superficial surface of this plant covered in long, tough thorns, it seems to actively follow and catch at you, bending over your head with its prickly narrow leaves or snagging your hair/clothes/eyes with long, barbed vines. Here it's a little more trackable, occupying only the edges of the farm as a soon-to-be supremely effective living hedge, but the prospect of counting it here as we did in our biodiversity survey at UHDP brings me back with full force to the monstrous white thorn rattan that we found snaking along spikily in every direction out from its giant, wicked mothership. It's a useful plant, and delicious in naam prik, but even planting the tiny, innocent seeds today reminded me of its violent future - not gently folding the seeds into the soil, but stabbing a sheath-based blade into the earth to chop it up. After all this trouble, I'll be pretty happy to slash up a stalk before its gets to be more than a foot high and the meristem hardens, and feasting on the delicious baby shoot.
More fun plant facts: yesterday, prepared and ate winged bean salad, the namesake being a vegetable every part of which (root, pod, bean, stalk) you can eat! Sarah (Jeff's wife) and Atchoo (and I, sort of) chopped it up with tomato, cucumber, and glass noodle, and tossed it with garlic sauce, soy sauce, peanuts and chilis, a little salt and sugar, lime juice, and cilantro. You can also eat it with apples. I suddenly feel like one of those people with a food blog.
Jeff and Sarah made this lunch (which, besides the salad, featured blackbone chicken soup, boiled cassava and longan dessert, ma po tofu, stir fried vegetables, fried corn cakes, and fresh papaya) for John, the owner of the Chiang Mai Mexican restaurant The Salsa Kitchen (which is pretty much across the street from our apartments). John, visiting Fair Earth Farm as a prospective buyer of organic prouce for his restaurant's menu, brought his mother, father, and aunt along for a tour of the grouns and lunch in the Rutherford's bright, breezy house, low to the ground and filled with windows and animals. The house is kind of like any child's dream - the have a hedgehog named Manny. A hedgehog!! - and a big world of vegetables outside.
On our tour - which I'd gotten a few days prior - we walked alongisde their self-dug canal, which is bursting with weird, feathery water hyacinths, an invasive species here in Thailand (not introduced by Fair Earth Farm, but all over the place in the irrigation canal right next to the yard). Jeff plants the hyacinths in his canal to feast on the nitrogen there until they stop growing, at which point he uses their nitrogen-rich selves as an excellent ingredient in compost. We also passed the malinga plant, a pure protein, which could be used in nutrient-deprived areas.
Fair Earth Farm has 3 little rice paddies bordered with the winding canal, and a retention pond off the back porch. One plan for the future is a duck-rice-fish integration, with the duck poop falling to the bottom of the pond/fish sanctuary, where it is eaten by the phytoplankton which are then eaten by the fish which then swim throughout the rice paddy, eating pests, etc. They are then eaten by us.
Rented a bike to get from Mae Rim to Chiang Mai on the weekends. Less a bike than some kind of arrangements of obnoxiously loud tin and bolds and string. Whatever, at least people can hear me coming.
More later!!!
What a CUTE hedgehog!
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