Showing 221 - 230 of 236
Some plants not as thirsty as you d-think
B Magazine, Normita Thongtham, Published on 15/04/2012
» Regular reader Ole Tarp sent me an email from Hua Hin seeking advice about his plumeria, or frangipani tree. ''It is blooming beautifully this month,'' he wrote. ''The problem is that it will do so only one month per year.
Life's a beach for these beauties
B Magazine, Normita Thongtham, Published on 08/04/2012
» 'Green Fingers" on March 4 offered some suitable choices for oceanfront homeowners looking for plants to add shade, decoration or boundary markers to their property. Coconut trees and casuarina, known in Thai as son talay, are the most prominent trees along beaches throughout the country, but they are by no means the only ones you can plant by the sea.
Grow your own
B Magazine, Normita Thongtham, Published on 01/04/2012
» The floods that put nearly a third of Thailand underwater for months last year sent the price of vegetables soaring, that is if they were available at all. This served as a lesson to one couple, who decided to ensure they maintain a steady supply of herbs and vegetables, floods or no floods.
Hard to find trees turn up full of flavour
B Magazine, Normita Thongtham, Published on 25/03/2012
» A reader named Malcolm wrote me an email to say that he is now the proud owner of a 10m fruit-bearing black sapote (Diospyros digyna). He said he grew it from a seed that he obtained from a tropical fruit farm in Australia 10 years ago.
Make the moist of it
B Magazine, Normita Thongtham, Published on 18/03/2012
» The exact number of trees killed by the floods that devastated nearly one third of Thailand from August last year to mid-January may never be known. But if we take into consideration the fact that no tree is able to remain alive in stagnant water for long, it is safe to estimate that hundreds of thousands if not millions of trees were wiped out. After years of hard labour tending their fruit trees, orchard growers in provinces ravaged by the floods will have to start all over again.
On the track of a mystery melon
B Magazine, Normita Thongtham, Published on 11/03/2012
» For nearly 15 years, Peter and Rita Zimmermann have regarded Thailand as their second home, spending five to six months of the year in Bangkok to escape the European winter and then returning to Germany in the summer. Both gardening enthusiasts, their home in Freiburg in the Black Forest area near the German border with Switzerland and France is full of botanical reminders of sunny, tropical Thailand.
These trees love a sea breeze
B Magazine, Normita Thongtham, Published on 04/03/2012
» Marc Jacqueline and his wife have acquired a piece of land near Khanom Bay in Nakhon Si Thammarat and want to plant trees around their property to define its borders. ''We were planning to use mango and coconut trees, but maybe we should look at alternatives such as teak or Acacia mangium or Caesalpinia pulcherrima,'' he wrote.
Orchids are born to be wild
B Magazine, Normita Thongtham, Published on 26/02/2012
» While we were staying in a hotel during a family holiday in Prachuap Khiri Khan, the friendly hotel owner suggested that we make a side trip to Dan Singkhon near the Thai-Myanmar border. ''There's a thriving market there for wild orchids from Burma,'' she said. I had heard of Dan Singkhon before, but although Prachuap Khiri Khan is my family's favourite holiday destination and we go there every chance we get, we had never been to Dan Singkhon. It's not because we don't like orchids, but buying orchids taken from the wild is tantamount to encouraging poachers to go back to the forests to collect more plants to sell in the market.
Be sweet to yourself with soursop
B Magazine, Normita Thongtham, Published on 19/02/2012
» The Jan 1 article on soursop (Annona muricata) generated letters from readers. Dr Kittipongse Sumipan, a retired scientist who worked at the National Research Council of Thailand, wrote to say that the fruit is common in his hometown of Nakhon Si Thammarat in southern Thailand.
On tuesday, Say it with flowers
B Magazine, Normita Thongtham, Published on 12/02/2012
» When was the last time you said ''I love you'' to the woman or man in your life? Some of you readers may say ''we are too old for that'', but deep in everybody's heart is the desire to hear that their loved one also loves them. I know, for I never tire of hearing the words from the man I love. Old as we both are, his reassurances of his love for me are music to my ears.