We are well into the rainy season here at Panya, at that usually means a pretty slow time here. Not slow in terms of nothing going on, because Panya never stops, but just not too many people around. For the past week we’ve just had seven people at Panya, including Kae and Ping.
But the slow time here has been enjoyable. Passionfruit are in season now and we have as many passionfruit as we can possibly eat. Also, with less people, we can eat a lot more by foraging in our gardens and the food forest. Tonight for dinner we had a salad entirely from the garden, cassava chips from the food forest, fried banana fritters from the banana firebreak, and homemade mayo from Pun Pun’s eggs.
As far as projects going on at Panya, we recently completed the construction of a bamboo fence around part of the food forest to protect our chickens, ducks, and geese from dog attacks. It’s working like a charm so far and we are starting to buy more chickens to build up our flock again. With any luck we should be eating our own eggs again soon and can remain self-sufficient for eggs well into the future.
Most of our time now is occupied by just keeping the gardens going and keeping the grass down, as this time of year everything is just growing like crazy and the jungle threatens to swallow up Panya completely. But we are staying on top of things and finding enough time to relax along the way.
Oh, and my own private project that I spend many afternoons working on is “Project Ant Pond” at the ‘chapel’, building a pond below the house to keep black ants from being able to invade the house. I was driven out of there a couple weeks ago by them and am now taking the fight to them. Let’s see how the ants handle a pond full of mosquito fish. Checkmate… I hope.
-Adam, of the Panya Crew
