Bin Gregory Productions » Land

Freshly Dug Ginger

bingregory — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 04:27:05 +0000

Freshly Dug Ginger

It is often my job to gather ingredients for the meal from our garden. Our ginger has lately done well enough to allow some occasional harvesting. Considering we use it in virtually every meal I doubt we’ll ever be self-sufficient but it’s nice to eat from your own land when you can.

Little tiny trees

bingregory — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 16:30:12 +0000

Durant repens, or pigeonberry, beginning its life as a bonsai

Living in Malaysia and not making bonsai is like living in Minnesota and not snowmobiling. You’re just not taking advantage of what is on offer. With a 12-month growing season, plenty of sunlight and rainfall throughout the year, the slow, slow pleasures of bonsai come just a little bit quicker.

It took me years to come around. I thought bonsai was for people who can’t appreciate the natural beauty of the plants growing all around them, that it was cruelty to trees, that it was kitschy. But really I just hadn’t seen the right bonsai. It was Harry Harrington’s site that did it for me. The images there are so sublime, so evocative, I thought if I could create something a tenth as beautiful one day, it would be worth it. Take the time to look through his galleries, they are stunning.

So far I’ve been puttering away at this hobby for about a year and a half. The picture above is the first piece I think has any potential, taken on the day I took it out of the ground, two days ago. Check back in three to five years for a finished product.

Wasteful

bingregory — Mon, 30 May 2011 01:30:45 +0000

It’s a fact. According to the FAO, Americans waste as much food at the table as South/SE Asians lose in their entire supply chain from farm to table! Put another way, individual Americans throw away 10-15 times more food than South/SE Asians. And that wastage is one driver for the global rise in food prices. Reading articles like The New Geopolitics of Food, you find a lot of concern over for instance the masses of Chinese who want to give their children a taste of milk, and the effect of that on the food supply, but what of the American throwing out half a bowl of milk with the remains of his Froot Loops? Living As Muslims reminds us of the Holy Quran saying “…and waste not by extravagance. Verily, He loves not those who waste by extravagance!” [Qur'an 6:141] [via The Global Food Outlook]

Malay Spiral Ginger

bingregory — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:08:06 +0000

Costus speciousus

The seasons on Borneo are so subtle, after eight years I still couldn’t tell you what month the rains end or when the dry season starts. But now that a shift is upon us, I relish the small differences. Winds are changing, rain falls harder, durians are appearing at the roadside, and the Malay Spiral Ginger is flowering again. Costus speciosus is a showy plant, thick canes holding giant red bracts throwing out a dozen white papery flowers one by one. It also one of two possible plants the Arabs call Qust and use for traditional medicine, the other possibility being Saussurea costus, some sort of Aster.

Agripleasure

bingregory — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 02:45:26 +0000

An article about Three Roods Farm by Garrison Benson.

When Dr. Greg uses the verb “observe” (which is often), he means a willful action, not a passively received effect. Once, for instance, we delivered a cartload of dead leaves to the adolescent chickens, to “stimulate their instincts,” and Dr. Greg suggested that we observe them. We sat in silence for ten minutes (that’s a third of a TV show, for most of us) watching the chickens stand still and nervously eye the leaves. “Well,” he said eventually, “We can come back later.”