Tropical Gardening School, somewhere in Chiang Mai province

 22-26 February 2011
 
After our long stay with Veechai, we headed to our next destination: tropical gardening school at Dokmai garden. When we first arrived I took a quick look around and then turned back to look at Veechai, he chuckled and said This is soo fancy - too fancy for you guys..... and we felt he was right but we wanted to give it a chance so we decided to stay and check it out. After the first hour of being there I realized that although it was very fancy, I was going to learn a whole lot! Our teacher was a self proclaimed mad scientist from Sweden named Eric ( a retired professor who wanted to get away from his desk and grant writing) Dylan and I decided to stay and im really happy we did. Within the next week I was taken to National Park to search for orchids and learn native plant species of Thailand (also on this trip was a Dutch seed scientist who taught us everything there is to know about orchids), learned how to pollinate orchids, transplanted orchids, learned how to grow and cultivate bananas, cut down my own bananas (then ate some), learned how to grow and cultivate rice (which I learned in an interview, through translation, with the mother of the house who was Isan and did not speak any English but grew up on a farm cultivating rice with her family), harvested taro root, cooked taro root desert, harvested cassava root, cooked cassava root desert, tried to start fires with a magnifying glass for a cooking pit (Erics idea), found the craziest bugs I have ever seen (pics to come), learned how to make panang curry, ate some fresh stevia leaves, tried some miracle berries (they make you taste the opposite, I was eating sour fruit but it tasted sweet! Crazy!), and probably the coolest part of all....Dylan and I got to harvest cacao and learn how to make chocolate! We only got to start the process though because it takes about 10-12 days and we were only staying for a week, but I have the knowledge to do it now!

So in one big run-on sentence, that was tropical gardening school at Dokmai Garden.