This has become a hobby farm. Over time, more activities has evolved and extend beyond swiftlet ranching. The theme remains centered on ecological & sustainable living.
The small river adjacent to the farm has plentiful fishes - right at my door step! Locals often come to fish or pick the floating veggies. I have observed various ways fishes are being caught here.
I don't have the patience like many who use rods or home made spear gun & sun-bake while waiting. I favor the lazy way - set a trap and come back in the evening. This one far surpasses those home made traps with plastic bottles... simply stretch it across the river.
The first catch - not bad, almost 50 gouramis! Regret I didn't get them alive, otherwise I would have add to my ponds. A passing neighbor told me I didn't set it up properly as the fishes got stuck at the end of the trap - drowned!
What? Fishes drowned! Well if they got stuck & can't swim they can't get oxygen, right! So that's another lesson for the day.
Asked my neighbor P'Wah what to do with it - "Just fried them." he said. So this lot ended up in his frying pan.
The other trap I've got to catch fishes from my own ponds. No luck for the first attempt, may be I need to find the right spot.
In the process of building the swiftlet farm, I have kept a keen eye on the natural resources around. With two large ponds on the property, that suits fish farming naturally.
So it's time to look beyond the swiftlet farm. Besides I have a bias towards an eco-lifestyle. That leads to an organic farm utilizing the space around the bird house and the ponds.
Perhaps I should change my blog title to reflect the extension of those activities. "Hobby Farm" sounds appropriate as commercial scale operation is not in mind.
Early this year, I bought some worms for vermi-composting, feeding them with fruit & veggie scraps. The river adjacent to my farm has endless supplies of floating veggies!
Recently, I visited some organic fertilizer producers to get a better perspective to scale that up. Here cow dungs are the raw material. The pit where the dungs are soaked and prepared for the worms.
Racks of plastic containers where the worms chew the dungs away to produce vermi-compost. Each bucket produces 5Kg/mth.
More than 2,000 buckets are housed under sheds - producing 10 tons/mth here.
A spinning cylindrical sieve separates the worms & their castings.
The castings are sun baked for a few hours to reduce moisture content.
Finally packed for distribution.
Worm bed nursery to produce more worms in-house.
Making of worm tea.
Bottled worm tea.
Worm castings are placed in a cloth bag immersed in an aerated tank.
Air-pump supplying oxygen to the tank - quite simple, isn't it?
My own worm nursery got off the ground too! Dampened card boards covered the worm beds to retain moisture besides being food for them too.
Most evenings I would spent an hour or so at my bird house. That's the time birds return to play. Here are some recent video clips.
It is really a joy watching them chasing each other around. They fly with such ease and grace. End of the clip shows where they go for thirst quenching dips! Apology for the camera shakes.
It was not easy to follow them on camera though! Just aim and shoot.
See them sweeping low for drinks! A bit far to see them on the camera.
I have wanted to do this for a while but without priority it only stays in the mind. Once I was with my neighbor P'Wah to the neighboring town of Tha Yang, he mentioned of a fishery research center nearby. Why not check it out? I would take opportunity to get some fishes for my ponds.
The center was preparing its stock for its annual release to the lakes and rivers. So we were directed to a commercial hatchery to buy some.
I bought 500 Tilapias costing only Bth 0.60 each! What a price - Bth 300 (US$10) for all!
Counting the fishes and filled oxygen to the bag later.
P'Wah had the honor to release them into the pond. He added water to equalize the water temperature in the bag prior to letting them go.
On another occasion my brother came for a visit, I took him to the hatchery again and got 200 catfishes - ones commonly seen on river cruises, abundant especially near temples. They can grow pretty large!
This time my brother's honor to release.
I have added another 100 Gouramis since. I was told they grow by about 1Kg per year. All together 800 now.. still seem very little in comparison to the pond size of ~4,950 square metre! They all disappeared and I don't see them around or have they been food to larger occupants? Well, leave it to laws of nature in there.
Then one fine day, I notice the small pond by the side of the rest house was beaming with aquatic plants and small fishes - some Pearl Gouramis I could recognize. These are natural inhabitants as I haven't put any fishes in there. Why not add some ornamental fishes in there?
Back to the hatchery I went. This time I bought 7 kois and 40 Silver Barbs.
I prefer those with white body with orange spots to be more visible. The smaller barbs were there too if you can spot them. They adopt the new environment readily judging the ease they swam around.
Looking down I see my fishes...
Looking up I see my birds - isn't that nice?
November 19th, 2010 - Some catches with my DIY fish traps! Creeks like this in my area have lots of small fishes. I am always curious to see what fishes are in there.
I used to take my son, Chris, to trap barbs and shrimps in Desaru, Malaysian streams long time ago. Bring back an old trick and made traps with 5L plastic water bottles. Simply cut off the top section.
Invert the top section and insert back into bottle. Add some holes at the rim to tie them together. (OOps .. photo was rotated anti-clockwise somehow?)
Put some bread in and immerse it in water. Come back an hour or 2 later. I don't know a better way and see the results!
It was a satisfying feeling to see the birds coming in to stay after the completion of the bird house. Time to take a deserving break - so was my thought.
Besides I was limping around with an injured knee from two bad falls. The first was a slip in the bathroom twisting my right knee with full body weight on it; never felt such a sharp pain before! Took me more than 2 months to recover. After that came 2nd time at a Thai restaurant - a piece of loose wood of the stairway slipped off on the way down. OMG.. twisting the same knee with the same pain again. Such bad luck!
Went back recently and saw how they patch up the stair step... not a great job, isn't it?
I really needed a break. Two months later back from Melbourne, I was anxious to check on the progress. Not a good feeling when I arrived at the farm - saw no birds flying around the bird house and the external sound was off. It hit me something must be wrong! There was an eerie silence as I went inside too. Internal sound was off too. Didn't take long to find out the electricity was cut-off.
Several spots of bird droppings were dried without fresh ones. These birds didn't came back obviously. Fortunately some residents were still around. So what went wrong?
Electricity was cut off - how could it be? I arranged for auto-payment via bank account! Oh..no, it was the wrong account in the application form. Somebody filled on my behalf but a mistake is a mistake!
It was a set back no doubt but soon birds came back and played with the sound system up & running again.
Then one day the sound system began to trip erratically for unknown reason. I had to reset it daily. Did the power supply fluctuate so much? It came to a point the sound system even tripped when I turned on a light! How can it be?
The voltage supply was 100V down when measured - almost halved! Voltage at the electric meter was good, probing along the 800M incoming wires to the farm soon reveal the fault location. It was the section where electric lines crossed the river - or rather submerged in water!
The electric pole at the river's edge tilted so badly the river crossing section sagged and submerged in water. The amount of floating plants grown over tells it occurred a long while ago.
P'Wah chopped through the vegetation to pull up the wires. Other electric lines were pretty low too, but mine went into water!
Finally he found the broken link. It was the neutral wire slashed by a knife blade. It became apparent that fishermen or farmers who came to cut the veggies inflicted the damage. It did not break the line completely and was a hidden problem. I still get electricity until corrosion over time severe the link eventually. I could still get some electricity with return path through the earth. This explains for large voltage drop and all the mysterious trips.
P'Wah was repairing the broken wire.
I have changed all the electric poles to taller ones and anchored deeper into ground to fix the problem once and for all. See how other poles inclined around mine's - the one most up right as it was recently erected.
The isolation "cut-out" switch was also broken by someone - an act of sabotage?
P'Wah was raising the wires high on ladder with safety harness.
Isolation switch was relocated higher out of easy reach.
The lesson was not to employ makeshift electric poles in the first place. The contractor did it the easy way that suited him. I thought it was OK as others were doing the same. But over time as nature forces took over in combination with unexpected events, things can go awe fully wrong - what if the live wire was cut accidentally instead? Somebody can get badly hurt if not electrocuted!
So don't compromise your standards by following others blindly.
It's been a long while since my last blog! Of course many things happened over this span of time, coping with unexpected events & attended to mundane stuff as well. I'll take time to write some of these.
I took a break after the completion of the bird house. But once the momentum was lost, it was not easy to regain it. I kept finding excuses one after another. My apology to those regular readers who came back here occasionally for updates.
Well last weekend I had a visitor with a story that shook me off my comfort zone. He is Da Da Ramakrishna walking from Sangklaburi to Phuket - covering 1,200 Km to raise funds to build a technical school. I was following his journey since early early November.
Sangklaburi is a little known town at a remote corner of Kachanaburi Province, 270Km north-west to Bangkok & near to Three Pagoda Pass at the Myanmar border.
He has walked 480Km to reach Petchaburi. The first leg of his walk to Bangkok would have been 360Km I reckon.
Photo of Da Da posing at my bird house on the morning before setting off again.
He arrived Petchaburi on 13th Nov 2010 noon, a day earlier than I anticipated. As he is vegetarian, my friend P'Wah called for assistance to locate this vegetarian restaurant. People here bidded him a warm farewell after learning he walked a long way here and even a longer way more to go.
After lunch I took him to Ban Laem to view the construction of a new bird house I am overseeing for a friend from Singapore. He was awe struck in disbelief so many buildings - each larger than his orphanage & just for birds!
He need a new pair of shoes & a mosquito net - we took him into town and found a similar pair he is wearing, cost Bth 180 or US$6 (US$1~Bth30) - Bth 40 (US$1.35) more than in Sangklaburi. "I thought it should be cheaper at a larger town." he remarked.
The worn pair he left behind.
Our thoughts were different: Those are not the right shoes for such long walks. His toes are blistered. How could he continue walking to Phuket? After diner we took him to a sports store with a variety of shoes to choose from. "It's rather expensive here." he said. Of course we won't let him pay. Besides, it is good to have a spare pair just in case.
Over diner, I reviewed his building budget and feel the construction cost can be significantly reduced.
The living room where he spent the night on a mat. Da Da was up early, laid out all his gears before repacking them.
He obliged for a photo shot with his fund raising message. I made a donation prior to his departure.
Took him out for a simple breakfast. Don't get the wrong message - He is not here to "Recuperate and Relax"! The fallen sign points to an Army Recreation Center nearby.
Drove him back to Phetkasem Road (part of Asian Highway 2) at the edge of town, where he was picked up the day before. Traffic is still light at this time, before 8am.
A final adjustment of his back pack and strapping the pair of spare shoes to his waist band.
He raised the walking stick we presented him, "This is good." he said, needs to ward off barking dogs approaching him at times! Gave him a hug and wished him a safe onward journey. Hope he is more comfortable with the Scholl sandals (chosen for its adjustable straps). I am not fully convinced this is right for his walk still; but he find shoes inappropriate as they pressed his blistered toes together, rubbing against each other during walk.
Da Da setting off towards Cha-Am for the day, some 40KM away. You can hear dogs hoofing soon as he walked off. "Dogs again!" he muttered. This is the main highway linking Bangkok to all southern provinces of Thailand. Feel the passing traffic zapping past him - trucks at 80KM/Hr typically, while cars speed range between 100 to 140KM/Hr!
Can you imagine what he has to endure covering another 700Km more from here to Phuket!
I have not known him before. Less than a day with him, I was touched by his strong will and determination in pursuit of his mission. He is an ordinary person, very humble and with a huge heart; not a super human yet out to achieve an extra-ordinary feat that most of us would shy away. He is not doing for his ego but for a cause he believes in.
My sincere wish is many of you out there can extend him a helping hand too, contribute a little to his cause. If you like to know more about his school project.
Link to his Technical School project & made a direct donation there at: http://prsarkartechnical.wordpress.com/
If there are other resources you can contribute, kindly PM me at chng.charles@gmail.com
7th Dec, 2010 update: I phoned Da Da this evening and he is on a bus to Bangkok en-route back to Sangklaburi. I thought he is still on the road. He reached Phuket on the 6th Dec. What walking pace he did over the past week!
I am glad he reached Phuket safely and going home by bus! He surely deserve a good rest afterward. He reached Phuket no doubt, but his goal in fund raising has yet to accomplish I suspect.
