Subscriber Newsletter #10

🦎🐜🐝Tropical garden critters...🐛🐿️

When I go outside and see the squirrels making their morning errands to the backdrop of birdsong, with the slow warmth of the sun sliding across my cheek at 6am, I feel like everything is wonderful. Then I go online and check the news and I’m supposed to feel like the world is ending - at least that seems to be the relentless angle.

Let’s take a break from world events and turn to nature, locally. Very local for me - my new garden project.

🐿️About that squirrel, traversing the overhead electricity cables.

The garden came with a few banana trees, and a mango tree. I put my first gardening shift in this morning at sunrise, arduously weeding until I could no longer bear the heat, around 9am. I found some interesting critters along the way.

🐜There is a red ant colony nearby the main banana tree, but my wife doesn’t want to exterminate them as she said they were here first, so it is their home too. We have to live in harmony with them in that case - although they enjoy biting me whenever they get the chance.

🦎There’s been a lot of action in the Pomelo fruit plant pot. In week one we found this lizard. My wife is shrieking in the background when the little fella jumped (she hates lizards):

🍌The banana tree is so huge that it now produces [หัวปลี] “hua pree” - known as “banana blossom” in English. We’ve already broken one off for my wife’s Aunt - apparently it can be used for Thai cooking as a sweetener.

🐝The bees lurrve hua pree, it must be like crack for them.