Pun Pun,

I’m finally on a farm, or something like it. Pun Pun is a sustainable living and seed saving center. I’m in the middle of a 10 day course here called get grounded where I learn their techniques of sustainable living. The workshop is very informal and laid back. The founders of Pun Pun, a Thai named Joe and his American wife Peggy, believe in making life easy and simple. Without much money they have converted a small hill that could only grow weed grasses into a small farm with lots of trees and adobe huts scattered among the beds. In our sessions we’ve covered compost making and gardening, seed saving, natural health techniques, making soap and shampoo, and several food products such as tofu, kombutcha, rice wine, jam, chlorophyll juice and yogurt. Now we are moving on to natural building techniques, focusing on adobe. We have made some bricks that are quickly drying in this dry and sunny landscape. Today we will start to build a house and then we will learn about plasters, paints and finishes. This course is truly inspiring, and it really makes me want to live in a country that doesn’t have strict building codes because it can be so easy to build your own earth or straw bale house. Joe said he built a small house for $13 using earth and salvaged materials.

Today we built! It was amazing how fast we made progress. We built up the small building about 1.5 meters in just 5 hours of work. As Peggy warned us, it was addictive. All you do is mix up mud and use it as mortar. Because you are not dealing with concrete, everything can be done by hand. If we had enough dry bricks we could easily finish the wall in another day. Tomorrow we will plaster the section of wall that we built today. This dry climate makes it very easy as we don’t have to wait long for things to dry.