Thailand 2015 - Part 2. Hanging with the Folks

June 15.  Time To Work!

We didn't arrive at the house until almost 3:00 a.m.  The plants looked fantastic.  I took them out and hosed them down to hydrate them some.  By the time we got ready to crash, it was after 4:00 a.m.  A half dose of a sleeping pill and it was lights out!  

I was shaken awake at 10:00 a.m. and told that the work crew was already on site and waiting for me.  Shit!  The second greeting of the day was from the heat and humidity.  The humidity was like an alien that just jumped out of a person's chest and attached itself to you.  It wasn't letting go.

There was lots to accomplish.  The plants brought from home had to be put into the ground or put into containers if used for gifts later.  I had mango scions to graft.  There was plenty of pruning still to do and holes to dig.  The work crew was helping with the holes and pruning going by my directions.  After pointing out where I wanted some holes started, I scouted out grafting sites on the current mangos.

Some of you may be wondering why the hell I'm doing all of this.  Good question.  Since we lost everything on the 2 acre plot of land to the 2010 flood, I'm fresh out of options on where to stay when we retire over here.  We sold the land after the flood.  It was so low and the water table so high, we were just asking for future disasters.  Everything in and around Bangkok is at sea level at most.  Land is also terribly expensive in Bangkok or near it.  You don't start getting into the higher elevations until you are in the outer provinces and they are expensive as well.  So we decided we'd stay with the folks.  They gave me control of the yard and my plan is to turn it into a small fruit paradise.

But back to my story...I only had mango scions of 2 Lemon Zest, 2 Edwards, and 1 St Maui.  I split these onto 3 separate trees.  I had some water shoots to graft onto for all but one.  This last one I did a bark graft with a Lemon Zest as you see in the picture above.  While I am writing this, I have no idea how each of these are progressing.  They were still green when I left.

Here are the 2 Mexican garcinias just planted.  As you can see, I get down in the dirt!  That's pa in the background.  He worked his ass off all day as well.

ST Maui graft below.  As I'm writing this, my wife informed me that they determined that this tree was rotting out at the roots...hence the major lean, and that they were going to have it removed.  So we will chalk the St Maui graft into the losers bracket.  There's always the next visit!

One of the Edwards.  Notice the date?  Yeah...I put 2016 on each of the tags like a dumbass.  Had to go back and correct them.  

The pleasant surprise of the day was the plant pictured below.  This is an achachairu seedling.  I had sent ma seeds from Puerto Rico in 2010.  Of the gazzillion seeds I sent her that trip, this was the only plant that survived Thailand's 2010 flood.  The folks eventually planted it in the yard.  It was a little small due to being heavily shaded by a tree recently removed.

Did I mention that it was hot and humid?  The heat I can deal with but man, that humidity sucked the life out of me!  Ma's reaction seems to say "what the HELL is that boy doing now?!".

Here's the folks and I putting in a new lychee tree.  The variety is amarin.  This variety does not need the chilling hours lychee normally requires.  Supposed to be good tasting as well.  After digging out several holes I began to wonder if there was anything more miserable to dig out than effing bananas?  There is!  A coconut tree that's what!  No wonder the work crew left this bastard cut just above the soil line and didn't dig any of this out.  It had the most incredible root structure.  The hole below is every bit of 6 feet away from the cut down coconut and the roots were still thick as a shake.  Damn near killed me trying to get this hole dug.  I had to jump high in the air and really stomp down on the shovel to cut thru them.

The area in the pic above is not "technically" the folks' responsibility...nor yard.  But the association doesn't mind as long as it is kept neat.  There were already a few papaya, banana, and a seedling jackfruit out there.  We added two mangos, the lychee, another jackfruit, durian, pomelo, mangosteen, and sugar apple.

June 16.  Searching for more plants.

Below is how I normally started my mornings off here in Thailand.  Maha chanook mango with sticky rice.  Delicious!

I've got to get the following out of my system.  Let me tell you, traveling anywhere with the fam is entertaining.  Seriously.  Dad usually did the driving with mom in front and Bee and I in the back.  I mentioned that dad was driving but what I meant to say was that he was the one behind the wheel.  There were actually three drivers in the vehicle...dad, mom, and Bee, my wife.  Three competing opinions on how best to get from point A to point B.  But even with the three drivers, there were normally at least twelve directions of travel in the air at once...with mom and my wife competing the hardest.  Even when the white flag was thrown in defeat and we stopped to ask directions, that too became just another contest.  There were times when they stopped, clearly not believing the good samaritan leading us to the illusive destination.  In-dash GPS?  That is just a distracting, glowing screen with pretty lines and arrows moving around...and probably wondering..."WTF?"!  Every now and then I would just remark..."at least we are all together".  The looks some people can give!  I'd also nudge my wife and ask "what's going on?".  I knew exactly what was going on but hearing my wife go at it was amusing.  But I never once complained.  First off, it was sort of funny.  Second, they were doing all this running around for me and I very much appreciated it.  Third...it was all good.  We truly were all together.  We always made it to our destination.  But you really had to experience it first hand!

What plant freak would visit Thailand without hitting up some nurseries and fruit farms?  The folks heard of a durian farm about 2 1/2 hours away in the Nanthaburi province and we were going to visit it.  This is one of the locations that eluded us but we finally made it.  Suan Maliwan durian farm.  We made it and the gates were closed and chained.  We called and the owner said he was not available for a few hours and asked if we wanted to come back.  He told us he had no durian available...all being reserved already.  No thanks.  I'm more of a hands on guy.  So the morning was not off to a great start.  We might as well go look for some plants.  Right?

We stopped off at a new nursery mom got wind of.  Talking with the lady, this place sounded like it was the best place we could have discovered.  They didn't have puangmanee or long lap lae durians we wanted at this location, but could get whatever size we wanted in 3 days.  Sweet!  We did pick up a Siam Ruby pomelo, daeng suriya jackfruit, and an amarin lychee.  Ordered some large durian as well as 4 mayong chid and 4 wan maprang.

Finding the durian farm and the nursery took up most of the morning and now everyone was hungry.  We at lunch at a Vietnamese place and it was very good food.

Our next stop was the Central Plaza mall in Nonthaburi for their little fruit festival.  It was...okay.  The best thing I can say about it was the availability of Hak Ip, or black leaf, lychees.  Awesome.

They had some puangmanee but they were already sold.

Back to the neighborhood.  We stopped at the nearby market to look around.  Tried some gan yao durian but thought it was way under ripe.  Flesh was hard.

Dwarf pineapple.  Unbelievably sweet and so full of flavor.  By far one of my favorite fruits of the trip.  I was especially looking for gai tod...fried chicken.  There is something they do differently that just makes me crazy for it.  None!  None to be found.  You've got to be shitting me.  This stuff is found on almost every corner and it is not in this huge market?!  Apparently not today.   But its been an incredibly long day and it's time to call it quits.

June 17.  More nurseries

In addition to the fresh fruit I have for breakfast each morning, mom had saved some mayong chid and maprang for me.  Frozen of course since their normal peak date is March.  The mayong chid was a very nice, small egg sized fruit.  Even frozen, it had a very sweet with a hint of tartness to give it a nice, complex flavor.  I thought fresh fruit would taste even better.  The maprangs came from the market since mom's had already been consumed.  These are mainly just sweet.  Still good, but I liked the mayond chid better.  These were much smaller too.  But overall, a win for each.


Below is the famous JJ Market in dowtown Bangkok.  Plants are sold on Wednesdays and Thursdays.  All kinds.  Stalls are packed from one end of the loop to the other.  And it's long!

I can honestly say that this was probably the hottest effing day of the trip.  Walking on the blacktop was like walking across a grill on high heat.  It radiated off of every surface and came at you like a runaway truck.  You couldn't dodge it.  You couldn't avoid it.  Shade only gave you a very small break.

We didn't buy anything but we did run into Supranee.  She ships plants all over the world and had shipped plants to my buddy Warren in Florida a few times.  Very nice lady to spend time with.  She gave out good advice for dealing with the Thai agriculture folks when I bring my plants in for inspection.  She's also keeping an eye out for pulasan plants for me.  99.99% of the people we spoke to had never even heard of pulasan.

After leaving JJ Market...with no plants, we got a call from the nursery where we had visited the day before.  We had ordered a large long lap lae durian for the yard and four maprang trees that I would be taking back home with me.  They tell us that they won't have time to bring the trees from their farm to the nursery.  That would have been great information to have before we left JJ Market!  Turns out this little nursery talked a good tree but could not produce one.  So now we have to find someone selling the maprang variety.
  
So the rest of the day was trekking from nursery to nursery to nursery and failing each time.  We stopped at one of ma's favorite nurseries and nosed around a bit.  We ended up purchasing a big monthong durian tree, ordering an even larger puangmanee durian, getting another mango tree...one that ma just had to have you understand, and a grafted mangosteen.  Why?  Why the hell not?

That's me standing beside some seedling mangosteens.  $3 each!!  Makes you sick in the stomach to think what we would pay for a splinter of a plant back home.  

We stopped at a nursery that mom had not visited before.  The Narong Nursery.  A really cool place.  Big and busy.  They had grafted trees of nearly every type from small to extremely large.  The owner has been there for 36 years.  He was 60 years old.  Does all the grafting himself.  Would have been a wonderful source of growing knowledge but he had no help that day and couldn't spare but a second here and there.

At his home, he had forty varieties of durian growing before the 2010 flood.  Now he has three.  That sucks.  After the flood, he grafted hundreds of durians and donated them to farmers who lost all their trees.  He had some maprangs but had only grafted them four days ago and would not sell them to us after being told they were going back to the states.  He said no way would the new grafts survive being bare rooted.  But mom did purchase another mango that she had to have.  I denote a pattern here.

At the end of the day, we tried one more spot.  This was another outdoor mall/market spot and had a huge section of nurseries all packed together.  A smaller version of JJ Market but under shade cloth.  We found some maprangs finally, but only two and not four like I wanted.  It's not that I did not want them.  The others were just way too large.  But as I thought of the six total plants I now have and their size, six is probably plenty...especially when there is a huge chance they get confiscated in Chicago by US Customs & Border Protection.  Or...loss from the bare rooting and any number of issues that kills perfectly fine plants.  These maprangs were a "new variety" that had fruit as large as mayong chid.  We'll see.  I had to stand there and listen to the translation of the young woman saying how no maprang will survive bare root shipping.  I know how most plants are shipped over here and I had no intention of copying their methods.

No one had any puangmanee durian.

June 18.  More work in the yard.

In the pic below, I'm checking the plants for dead branches, insects, eggs, whatever.  I'm also removing the unstretchable, unbreakable, nylon strip they wrap and secure the grafts with.  Nurseries will leave this shit on and never remove it no matter how long the plants have been sitting there.  So what ends up happening is this crap starts doing some major girdling of the trunk.  Sometimes it is so bad that the tree has grown over it.  But it is just a matter of time before the tree will die I'm sure...at least sure as hell would if it were mine.  I had to use a razor to cut it since it was so tight.  Crazy.

This morning, mom and Bee left to go pick up the remaining plants at that "wonder" nursery.  They came back with a long lap lae durian a little bigger than a seedling that just germinated.  WTF?!  Where's that giant durian plant she promised.  Her words were that we have all sizes all the way up to fruiting.  Right.  No more wan maprangs as promised either.  What else was in the SUV?  More mangos.

We'll not much I can do about it.  We had to be cleaned up and ready to go to lunch to meet friends by 11:00.  So we got busy digging more holes and putting plants into the ground.  Just dug out this hole that was 6 feet away from a cut down coconut tree.  Holy shit!  The roots even that far away damn near killed me trying to dig down thru them.

Here's our monthong durian in the ground.  Little over 5 feet.  About $12.  We got six more trees in the ground with a little time to spare.

Here we are at the Regis Hotel for lunch.  Friends of the folks invited all of us out to a killer buffet lunch.  It was an effort to stop going back for more.  This theme seemed to play out often with my meals!

We spent a good part of the afternoon with them before heading home to relax.  Dad and I dicked around with the garden hoses trying to water plants.  We ended up heading to a shop and purchased a 35 meter hose with all the necessary hardware.  Necessary hardware?  Yeah, I haven't seen any garden hoses yet that had all of the connectors already on them.  You had to purchase these separately and clamp them on yourself.  Okay.  No problem.  

This hose was just what the good doctor needed.  It could reach anywhere in the yard, with the brand spanking new, gentle-as-rain shower nozzle.  It could also reach all of the plants across the street.  We replaced the hardware on another hose and we called it a day.

That pretty much wraps up the first couple of days.  It wasn't long after dinner before we were all ready to pass out from exhaustion.  It has certainly been quite a week so far.  I lost count of the number of nurseries we visited.  It was a lot of driving around.  But I secretly believe the folks are happy that someone in the family is finally interested in the fruit trees in the yard!

We're all having fun and I'm sure the folks are just happy having their daughter close at hand.  We are all certainly spending a lot of quality time together.  And that ain't bad.

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If you want to see the rest of the pics during this blog's time frame, then go to my galleries page or click on the following:  Thailand 2015 - Hanging with the folks.

Okay...that ends part 2.  Three more to go!  Check out my next blog by clicking on the following:  Part 3, which covers our trip to Rayong.