5.30 p.m.
Manny, the hedgehog, was happily scurrying in the overgrown grass in the ‘lawn.’ I was happy to see that he couldn’t squeeze through the holes in the woven chicken dome used for keeping fighting cocks. I don’t like him spending too much time in his cage, poor fella. Sarah takes him out every morning so he can race around (at hedgehog racing speed) in the yard and poop, but he needs more nature, I reckon. Once the house is finished, he’ll get it.
After feeding the ducks and chickens, I collected about a half kilo of olives (ma gork nam) from the neighbor’s tree. (Ours are still too young.) I’m going to pickle them, using a simple recipe I got from the internet. It worked pretty well a couple of years ago.
Then we were in the pond, Annie’s favorite time. We raced each other to see who could squish the most snail eggs. The golden apple snail is the chief rice pest in these parts. They crawl up grass or plants and lay their eggs above the water. To control them organically, one simple step is to crush the egg clutches when you find them. We turn it into a game.
Then I weeded around the canna lilies and other water plants, the hairiest job being pulling up the spiny mimosa growing along the edge of the pond and tangling up the flowering plants. This nitrogen-fixing plant isn’t as bad as people think it is, but it’s hard on the mitts. While I lay on my belly in the pond on the submerged and sloping bank, Annie covered my exposed shoulders with mud. She also applied mud “medicine” to my scratched-up fingers. Then we played another game/exercise: pulling lotus. The lotus spreads really quickly and we don’t want it to take over the entire pond. So periodically, I get in and yank them out, using the plants to mulch around the pond trees. I pull myself underwater on a stout lotus stem, and feel my way along the shallowly buried roots, pulling them up gently and trying not to break them so I can see how far the roots extend. I do this until my breath runs out, take another breath and go back down.
Then we jumped into the big canal at the edge of the property and let it pull us downstream a couple hundred kilometers. The water is nice and cool compared to the lotus swamp.
12.30 p.m.
I worked off a too-heavy lunch of laap khom and sticky rice and walked the farm with Ai Seud to plan out this week’s work: cut the grass. Clean up the dyke along the small irrigation canal. (That would be choice veggie bed terrain, given time and improved soil.) Stake netting around one of the veggie beds to keep out the chickens so I can plant corn, sorghum, Job’s tear, grain amaranth and maybe some dry rice. Prepare the seedbed for the neighbor’s rice field. Plant Thai melons and pumpkin in select spots along the dykes. Plant the coffee, tea, sweetleaf and other seedlings I placed in odd locations around the farm. Plant sorghum in the “compost beds” for carbon (along with the already planted sunn hemp and mung bean for nitrogen).
We had a hard look at Ai Eed’s paddy problem. The paddy is a boggy mess, mostly ignored and poorly farmed by the previous tenant. That’s good in a way: since he mostly left it fallow and then sloppily farmed just a part of it, the soil might have had a chance to rest a bit. And he couldn’t afford to be too crazy with the chemicals. I didn’t notice a great abundance of snail eggs stuck to the grass. Some places in the neighborhood are tinged pink with a profusion of egg clutches. It seems the more molluskicide they dump, the more golden apple snails they get. Ai Eed’s place didn’t look too bad, but it’s still an issue. If we open a drain for him into our system, we need to make sure we have nets in place to prevent his snails and predator fish from entering, or our fish from exiting. And because the place is so boggy and overgrown with weeds, the tractor guy wants 1,500 baht to do the job, which is quite a bit more than the norm.
6.30 a.m.
Road my bike the 1 km to the farm and fed the ducks and chickens. They both got some soybean meal with their rice today, byproduct of Sarah’s most-delicious soymilk. She mixed some of our brown rice with organic soy from ISAC (Institute for Agricultural Communities). She reckons it’s about the right consistency (next time add more brown rice) but a bit too sweet. Sounds right to me.
The first generation of chickens out of Sao Baannork and Jao Phor (Country Girl and Godfather) aren’t afraid of me like the elders and will eat out of my hand. Jao Por is finicky and disdains everything but broken rice (a mill byproduct), but the kids eat everything. The day before I fed them a mad mix of stuff: soybean cake, leftover steamed cassava, overripe bananas, rambutan and longkong. They gobbled it all up.
I was looking at the neighbor’s overgrown paddy and heard what I believed to be peeps from swamp hen chicks in a tangle of weeds under a leucena tree that some workers had cut down and chucked in the paddy. Typical, that: cut and thrown into the paddy. Not chopped neatly into firewood. Not cut up into an unruly pile on the dyke. Toppled over into the rice paddy for someone else to deal with.
Anyway, Ai Eed just bought the land and filled a space for a house and a drive. He asked me if I wanted to farm the rest. They have a bad drainage problem (ie. no drainage at all). I told him I’d let him lay a drain pipe into our canal system if he promised to never use chemicals. As a city guy working for a mobile telephone company and only considering farming as a kind of landscaping, organic is easy for him. He agreed. Now we need to negotiate with the tractor guy.
I took some pictures of the paddy. We’re going to open the dykes and flood the paddy. Ai Seud is going to transplant the last small remaining section of paddy. The morning was stunning, the rising sun cutting slices of golden light through the shadows across the paddy.
