During the 10 years they have been there, they have experienced many hardships – very poor clay soil, incessant rain, forest fires on neighboring hills, floods, elephant raids and for the first two years there they had no electricity. Water was pumped from the pond with a bicycle pump, the soil was built up by carrying buckets of silt from the pond. But thanks to hard work and ingenuity, studying permaculture and other nature-based principles, and inter-generational wisdom, they are enjoying an abundant and self-sufficient life.
In addition to many wild edible plants, there is an impressive kitchen garden with many different kinds of tomatoes, herbs, watercress, miniature cucumber, chillis and pumpkin – all hardy varieties that can withstand the local conditions – almost all from their own saved seeds. Elsewhere they have yams, cassava, jackfruit and many interesting wild fruits and berries including a Mexican grape tree. With protein coming from fish, rabbits, eggs, insects and the occasional squirrel, more than 50% of their food is from their own land – with most of the rest coming from work exchange and gifts.
I asked David if he could tell us more about their story…
When did you come to Thailand?
I came to Thailand at the beginning of 2014 – initially as part of a “gap year” to figure out what to study later on – but decided halfway through the year that this is much more exciting than going to university.
Where did you live first?
What were you doing there?
Where did you meet Karn?
I met Karn after the owner and his family moved to another province to start a new project in 2016 and left me to take care of the place. I actually know Karn’s aunt for a long time, I met her right in my first year here because she had a small Isaan food restaurant on the other side of the road – I used to eat there sometimes on my day off. Right after graduating from university, Karn was working the front desk in some fancy five-star hotel in Phuket at the time, and came to visit her aunt (“Ah Mali”) on the weekends.
At the time, I also took care of a wonderful, wild fruit orchard for a friendly old couple in the next village, a 20-rai mixed fruit forest with plenty of large jungle trees right next to the Khao Phanom Benja National Park that had been abandoned for ten years.
By chance, Karn saw me coming back from that orchard after a hard day’s work, dirty, sweaty, with my machete on my hip, riding my dirtbike – and consequently inquired with her aunt who that strange foreigner is that lives next door. Apparently, I seemed very much unlike the tourists that frequented the hotel, which got her curious. Ah Mali introduced me to Karn, and the more we talked the more Karn realized how much our ideas, worldviews, preferences, dreams and hopes aligned. As a child she lived a very simple life, deeply connected to the environment that nourished her, on her parent’s rice farm, and she never really adapted well to life in the big city. Consequently, she quit her job a few months after we met to join me on the farm.
What made you first interested in permaculture?
As a teenager, environmental and social issues & concerns were among my interests. Partly as a result, in my late teens I became keenly aware that our contemporary high-tech, consumer-capitalist society was eventually heading for a cliff in my lifetime. After spending a long time pondering what might be done about this predicament, I decided it might be useful to move to a country with a friendlier climate and learn how to live off the land – as a start. Permaculture just seemed like the best place to start this journey.
I also did two horticulture-related internships in school (one on an organic farm and one in Munich’s Botanical Garden), which I enjoyed a lot, and both of my grandparents were farmers – my maternal grandparents pretty much subsistence farmers (sheep, chickens, bees, vegetable garden, potato plot, fruit orchard, and a carpentry as business). All this influenced me greatly, the extent of which only became really clear to me much later.
Where did you study permaculture?
I never did any official permaculture course, I don’t hold a PDC (and neither did the owner of the project in Krabi), and didn’t have any world-famous mentors. Initially, what we were doing was often rather haphazard, mostly trial and error, but fortunately Nature is a gentle and patient teacher. We knew the very basics (the zones, the ethics, some basic techniques, etc.) but wanted to know if we could make it work by ourselves. Only later did I actually pick up some books about it. Once Karn and I started living & working together, we intensified our studies in order to prepare hosting volunteers ourselves.
To this day, we’re self-taught generalists without any “official” qualifications who don’t stick to any particular term or ideology too much. We incorporate elements of indigenous horticultural techniques & wisdom, syntropic farming, and a whole panoply of other thinkers, writers and gardeners.
I don’t believe that any sort of degree or certificate is necessary to practice permaculture successfully. Pretty much everyone can do it if he or she adheres to a few basic rules and principles (which Bill Mollison actually credited various indigenous cultures for). Some of the most impressive “permaculturalists” that Karn and I have ever met don’t even know what the term means: Karn visited two Pagakayaw communities living sustainably off their ancestral homelands up North, and I met a truly extraordinary old man in Kiriwong, Nakhon Si Thammarat who tended an organic 40-rai mixed fruit orchard right next to the forest.
What are some of the most important principles of permaculture that have helped with your project?
I could probably write an essay just about this question! Well, first and foremost, I’d say that what’s most important for us is that we allow wild Nature to be our teacher, together with all the myriad forms she takes – plants, animals, fungal networks, rivers, etc. – and think about how we could participate in all that in a way that provides an overall benefit to the rest of the ecosystem and leaves it as a better place due to our presence.
This of course also included studying the ways of the natural human cultures, the people who have lived sustainably off the land we now inhabit for countless generations, long before the forests were cleared for grain monocultures: the indigenous Chong people (and other groups of hunter-gatherer-horticulturalists in the region and in similar climates around the globe). Some more common “principles” that would make the top 10 include (but are not limited to): “Feed the soil, not the plants”; incorporating “humanure” as fertilizer in the nutrient cycle; and a classic one, “The problem is the solution” – it’s all a matter of changing your perspective.
Your life seems very hard – when you could have had a life of comfort in Germany do you have any regrets?
Our lives only seem “very hard” from an “outsider’s perspective” – it’s all relational. Just like when David Attenborough comments in one of his documentaries how the penguins “battle the freezing cold”: yes, it’s “freezing cold,” but only for David Attenborough – not for the penguins. This is just the normal temperature for them, to which they are perfectly well adapted.
Wearing shoes and uncomfortable clothes at all times and working a regular nine-to-five office job in some air-conditioned, neon-lit cubicle somewhere would surely be much harder for us.
My baseline for what I consider a “comfort” has shifted considerably as well over the years, so I now feel very comfortable with a much lower material standard of living than I grew up in. Comforts as we have come to understand the term in modern society tend to be hopelessly overrated, and the best luxuries in life are free.
