Farming
The garden is the show
Terraces, fence, flume and ridge, each doing its job.
ป่า ๓ อย่าง ประโยชน์ ๔ อย่าง
A hand-painted animated series about a small permaculture homestead in the hills of northern Thailand, where every dish is cooked from something you watched being grown, dug, or picked.
A working garden
A real Thai land idea, and the one this place is built on. The films are a visual aid to real growing: contour terraces, a living fence of cha-om, a bamboo flume, coppice on the ridge, each shown doing its job on the hillside.
The homestead is imagined and the films are animated. The horticulture is not. Every plant in frame would genuinely be in season on that hill, and each carries its botanical name in the film's notes.
Real recipes
Each film follows one dish from the garden to the table. No narration, no recipe cards. Soil breaking, a knife on wood, water coming to the boil.
The films stay traditional: wood fire, a blackened pot, a stone mortar. The written recipe under each film is the one we cook at home, and it says where a modern kitchen changes things, a gas ring for the coals, a blender where the mortar is optional, what to reach for when the market is a long way from Nan.
Modern and traditional
A homestead in Nan in this decade keeps a motorbike under the house beside the water jars, and a gas bottle beside the hearth. Both are in the frame on purpose. Every film ends at the table under the house, because that is where the day does.
Made by a husband and wife who cook this food together. New film roughly every month.
Farming
Terraces, fence, flume and ridge, each doing its job.
Cooking
Traditional on film. Practical on paper.
Living
A motorbike beside the water jars, and nobody pretends otherwise.
Late rains. The grove is dug in August, the shoots scored and peeled at the counter, the green water squeezed from yanang leaves, one boil over wood and no drain. Chicken in, bamboo in, dill last.
Episode one · the pilot came before it