Pun Pun--Center for self Reliance

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Pun Pun--Center for self Reliance

Punpun is a small organic farm and learning center in north of Thailand, where we practice sustainable living through seed saving, natural building and appropriate technology.

OUR PHILOSOPHY

We run our farm, community, and programs based on an experimental and experiential learning approach. We have worked with various groups for the past several years, and find this approach to be the most effective.

We believe in learning by doing and that there is not only one way of doing things. We don’t believe in experts, but in learning together by sharing our collective experience. We have seen that through opening the door for further exploration, new developments can occur. “Mistakes” are simply opportunities for more learning. This means that we spend more time working and experimenting with techniques, rather than discussing them in a classroom. We also keep time open for discussion and questions as needed. Since we are in Thailand we teach based on a tropical climate that can be adapted to be used elsewhere.

We also strive to break-down the structure of experts and students. We feel we are all learning continually everyday. True development comes from taking wisdom and knowledge from others and experimenting ourselves to create improvement. This is all we do. We will share with you what our experience and knowledge we have gained has taught us and we will also experiment together to develop new knowledge together. Our teaching style is strongly focused on hands-on learning. We feel with the skills we are learning it is essential for us to do it ourselves with our own hands in order to gain the confidence to leave the place and take the skills with us. We will also try to balance this with discussion and principles. We invite you to be open in accepting a teaching technique which may differ from what you are used to. And to also try as much as possible to come into the experience with little to no expectations, open to what happens through the process.

WHAT WE DO

Pun Pun is a small organic farm, seed saving center, and sustainable living and learning center.  We strive to find more ways to live a more self reliant lifestyle by growing organic food, building our own natural homes, and experimenting with low tech appropriate technologies.  We seek to bring back the tradition of seed saving amongst farmers and growers by collecting, propagating, and exchanging indigenous and rare varieties.  We seek to live simply and continue to learn.

SEED SAVING

We feel like bringing seed saving back into the hands of farmers and growers can empower people as well as increase the quality of seed and varieties we have to consume. As a seed center we collect rare and indigenous seeds from Thailand and all around the world, propagate them at the farm, and when we have enough distribute them through our loose network of other organic farmers and communities. We are a living seed bank meaning we do not only collect seeds to keep but grow and exchange the seeds continually to propagate the species coming back to use. We are now beginning to package and distribute organic heirloom seeds to the local area.

NATURAL BUILDING

To us natural/sustainable building means using readily available, local, natural materials with little embodied energy and salvaged materials to make your own home. This can mean using adobe (sundried mud bricks), straw, strawbale, clay, cob, bamboo (an easily regenerated wood source), stone and secondhand/salvaged materials you have access to. Natural building techniques are ancient and time tested and have housed much of the population of the world. We use these traditional techniques with experiments and innovations people are discovering today to make them a practical alternative for modern days to the resource intensive conventional building done today. We at Pun Pun focus on building primarily with adobe, bamboo, straw, and clay.

ORGANIC GARDENING

At Pun Pun we practice organic gardening without the use of any chemical fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides. We do integrated beds of a diverse range of varieties, reducing our need for pesticides. We propagate our own effective micro organisms for liquid fertilizers and make our own composts. We practice mostly hand cultivation and care. We grow rice, vegetables, herbs, local perennial edibles, fruit trees, and have fish ponds and egg laying chickens.

OUR PRODUCTS

We have started making several seasonal products at the farm including Kaffir Lime Shampoo, hard soaps, nut butters, seasonal jams including roselle and mulberry from the farm, and working with local villagers to make dried bananas and banana chips. Products are available at the coffee shop at the farm and at various shops in Chiang Mai.  We can also send you products by order.

Source: http://www.punpunthailand.org/index8a90.html?page_id=498