After our brief respite on Sunday, we jumped right back into a full swing of activities today with the start of Farm Lab. All but three of the PDC students are staying on for this extra week of student-driven workshops. Together we brainstormed a list of ideas that we would like to implement here on the farm. It included everything from pickling, jam making, and kombucha brewing to making a solar oven and earth building. So this week is an opportunity to experiment, test, implement, try out, create, recreate, learn, teach, and workshop... Pretty awesome!
Not all of our ideas are feasible (unfortunately SCOBY is not something readily available in Bang Phra, nor is methanol for brewing biodiesel) but we sat down this morning to form the doable activities into a rough schedule for the week, and then got started. First on the list of activities: paper making!
Rachel, Sam and I bicycled to a nearby pond to harvest the fluffy cotton like seeds of cattail reeds. We waded in boots through tall grasses and lily pads, reaching up to the tops of the tall stalks and plucking off the fluffy ends that would become the fibrous material for the paper. We returned to Daruma with five full bags of fluff, which we then placed in 20 liters of water and mixed with some sodium bicarbonate. We brought it all to a boil and then stirred periodically for three hours. I tended to the fire throughout the afternoon to keep the pot at a slow boil… but that’s as far as we got. It’s 10 pm now and the pulp mixture is still waiting for the next steps: blending it up, sifting it through a net, and some other things I’m not too sure of. Neil was spearheading the operation but then got caught up with some preparations for tomorrow’s activities and the process just kind of stopped.
Rachel, Sam and I bicycled to a nearby pond to harvest the fluffy cotton like seeds of cattail reeds. We waded in boots through tall grasses and lily pads, reaching up to the tops of the tall stalks and plucking off the fluffy ends that would become the fibrous material for the paper. We returned to Daruma with five full bags of fluff, which we then placed in 20 liters of water and mixed with some sodium bicarbonate. We brought it all to a boil and then stirred periodically for three hours. I tended to the fire throughout the afternoon to keep the pot at a slow boil… but that’s as far as we got. It’s 10 pm now and the pulp mixture is still waiting for the next steps: blending it up, sifting it through a net, and some other things I’m not too sure of. Neil was spearheading the operation but then got caught up with some preparations for tomorrow’s activities and the process just kind of stopped.
So, yeah, paper making not a complete success. Perhaps we can finish up tomorrow morning but if not I’m already excited for Tuesday’s lineup (green smoothies with Troy, cooking lessons with Pang, and making coconut oil!)
More soon,
Kelly
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