Free for 3 Days #expatlife

Water Heart

Free for 3 days

Balanced #expatlife

Part of my quest to find this balance started almost 20 years ago when I left the United States in search of something better.

You don't have to become an expat to find this balance Joe speaks of, but if your circumstances are right, it can be a major step towards it.

Get the Feeling of Isan #expatlife

The Khaan played by Sombat Simlah. The feeling of the northeast of Thailand and Laos. Like it?

The same juice in my novels.

How to Start a Farm in One Year #1: Black and Red Chickens #expatfarm

BLACK AND RED CHICKENS: 

an ESSAY about Permaculture Farm Life

This will not make much sense at first. But, when all of the essays are finished (12 in all) and posted on the blog you will know everything you need to know about how to start a farm in Isan or the Northeast of Thailand where land is cheap and many foreigners settle.

Some chapters will be step by step instructions and some more like essays (like this blog post). Hey, it's my blog and I have about 3 readers not including my mom. But, if you are careful you can learn a lot.

The crew from the city appeared with a backhoe to clear 3 meter strips along the canal running through the bottom of my farm in Sakon Nakhon, Thailand. The drunken crew left me with several Eucalyptus trunks to chop, clean and mulch then carry 150 meters up a clay road to the cabin. 

We were trying to stay pure and did not use tractors.

    
About the same time a local farmer offered me 10 free Rhode Island Reds. They were old hens saved from the 2 year culling system at the local, ag university. But, I was resisting animals and most forms of capitalism,  except for fish, because I was keeping things simple and avoiding the duties of checking them every day, theft, and buying feed as I was not as productive as I had hoped, focusing more on earthworks and fruit trees which are long, long term.

     But, I had the logs and a good spot shaded by mature bamboo and a massive Japanese wattle. The spot at the end of the road was also the edge of zone 1 where an old compost pile left very active soil covered with 6 inches of leaves. Maybe it was time.

      The trunks are very hard wood and it is not necessary to use cement in the post holes. They will last 10 years- even in the wet/ dry tropics with just tamped, wet clay. An old rice barn torn down last year was providing scrap lumber for many projects- a bridge, mushroom house shelves, a hammock frame and now a chicken coop. Even the rusted zinc roof panels from the rice barn were good enough after 20 plus years. The old 2 by 6 boards could hold up the roof and frame the wire walls.

     Temperatures here are well over 100F so I appropriated a vinyl banner from the university dump. It just happened to match the width of the coop- blocking a good bit of morning sun. The west side was already shaded by the Wattle and the thorny bamboo which I also pruned and tossed into the fish pond. Thieves tangled their fishing nets and ran home empty handed.

    I covered the floor of the coop with more leaves and a dozen bushels of rice straw from that season's threshing. A neighbor brought 10 sacks of rice husks, free for anyone who would haul them away from the old rice mill. I hung the shop bought yellow feeder and watering jug from the rafter, then wired 2 locally woven egg baskets in to shady corners. These baskets used to be for sale at every village shop, but these past few years 7 Eleven showed up and the local crafts are fading. Something is missing from these plastic farm products. The colors of the handmade tools are rich with a certain glow and they smell right. I can't fully explain it.

     The old hens settled right in and scratched, pecked and spread the deep bedding in 1 night. They were good housekeepers and ravenous eaters. 3 year old hens are fine. They are happy and give us from 5 to 7 eggs a day- more than enough for my family of 4.

     The great benefit of active chickens is the compost under deep bedding. Keep 6 inches of anything, napier or lemon grass, rice husks, weeds, bamboo leaves, pigeon pea, for them to scratch and eat. Later, you can dig 4 inches of rich, dry compost out from under that mulch any time of year. I cleaned the whole coop once for fruit trees and filled 2, 80 gallon drums.

    A few other benefits worth mentioning are kids and kitchen scraps. The kids love to sit in the coop and pet the hens. They try to imitate that cooing sound. Just about every scrap from our family kitchen went to the coop, the worm bin or the fish pond. And the hens loved it. They huddled by the door in the morning and waited for their share. It seems to me as well, the lactic acid bacteria from the rice and other fermented scraps kept the microbial community active. The coop never smelled bad.

     But the year of red chickens ended badly when the mismanaged dam 50 kilometers upstream topped and flooded the whole region. I was underwater 21 days. The hens slept next to the door, and it isn't likely they had enough time to get to the perch. It isn't clear how high the water reached, but it is also not certain the perch was high enough.

     We recovered after 3 weeks of hard work, but the coop would be empty another 6 months. Several groups of volunteers came and went and encouraging me to find a new flock, but I was a little shy of the responsibility again and still in flood shock.

     Eventually though I would acquire 5 new hens and a rooster. Black boned chickens with bright white feathers from an old, permaculture farm the King of Thailand built 30 years ago. The chickens were bred by a local veterinarian to suit the wet dry hot climate. They came from a local, Sakon Nakhon chicken and a Jersey Giant. Even the meat is black. They named them, Phu Phan Song, after the mountain above us and from where I write to you today.

My Collection of Short Stories