#bkkfm

Source: plmyeol (wangstory)

Source: BemyOxygen

Bobby Ba got bored. He grew up in Bangkok listening to commercial pop, the usual same-old same-old. One day he decided he had just had enough of it. He walked into a record store and asked the shopkeeper to recommend something new and exciting.  He walked out with his first ever jazz CD. The music hit him like a revelation. Having trained to be a chef, he suddenly realised that he just had to devote his life to jazz. He now runs Sweets Jazz Club, which has become the venue of choice for thoroughbred jazz musicians. At Sweets, the jazz comes first. Listeners pay a cover charge (200-300 Baht) to make sure they are there to listen to the music, and the musicians have total musical freedom. The jazz artists enjoy the fact that they can play real jazz, instead of jazzed-up pop, and like that they don't have to compete with chatter and mobile phones. Sweets' current regular venue is Bad Motel at 8pm on Sundays, but they treated us to two stomping  jazz sets at the Farmers' Market in K-Village last weekend. Bobby brought some of the many jazz CDs he has in his eclectic catalogue. For more information, you'll find Sweets on Facebook at /sweetsjazzclub.

Thanks to everyone who generously gave their time and energy, we how have the makings of a garden on the roof at The Vue. The idea is to use this garden as a showcase and testing ground with a view to encouraging other buildings to cultivate their unused roof space. If you have some roof space that you could put to good use, here are a few things you'll need to know. 1) Before you start building your roof garden, you need to familiarise yourself with the structure of the building. Concrete is semi-permeable, so you need to make sure that there is adequate drainage, and you will need to put down a waterproof layer before you start laying your soil. You also need to be sure that the roof is strong enough to support the plants that you are planning to grow. Familiarize yourself with the mature height, weight and root depth of the plants you choose. You may well need some larger plants, because they will provide shade for vegetables and cool-weather plants to grow beneath them, but make sure you’re not planting a sapling that will turn into an unmanageable giant. 2) Be prepared for some pretty hard graft at the outset. It will be hard work getting the wood, bricks and soil up to the roof, but rest assured that it will get easier once the basics are in place. 3) Design your plant beds in a way that is manageable. They should be no wider than an arm’s width, so that you can tend them easily. A spiral shape is (as above) is thought to optimize the distribution of water in the bed. 4) You will need to fertilise the plants. At The Vue, we will be composting food from the restaurants on the lower floors. It is quite possible to do this safely, hygienically and without too much smell by arranging the composting bed correctly, ensuring that meat, bone and rice are placed in the middle of the bed and covered. If you would like to know more, contact Kwan, our resident expert on permaculture, via Facebook at facebook.com/Bangkok-Permaculture.

When it came to developing and packaging natural laundry liquid, Lee Francis at Nuts About Soap (soon to be renamed Sudsberry) encountered some of the same issues that many of the Farmers’ Market vendors are dealing with. He has a fantastic product. It is an all-natural liquid derived from soap nuts. Almost all conventional cleaning products contain Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS) which, among other things, causes rashes, has been found to kill skin cells, is toxic to fish, and requires a production process which itself produces considerable amounts of pollution. Lee’s soap, on the other hand, is natural, hypo-allergenic, fish-friendly and easily biodegradable. But it was precisely this ability to biodegrade that presented Lee with a key problem. If you are dealing with natural products, without using any kind of chemical preservative, your product invariably runs the risk of having a very short shelf life. Lee’s current solution to this is a compromise. He has used no preservative in the laundry liquid, but he packages it in standard wine boxes to ensure that the liquid is stored without contact with air. This enables the liquid to last a long time, but it does mean that there is a substantial amount of unsustainable plastic in the packaging. To ensure the right amount of strength, the wine bag requires seven layers of laminated plastic, which cannot be recycled. What’s more, the wine bags and the outer boxes are shipped to Thailand from China, while the soap nuts are currently shipped from India, all contributing to the product’s carbon footprint. Lee is taking steps to resolve some of these issues. For example, he is making plans to start growing soap nuts in the north of Thailand. But some issues are currently beyond his control. There is no ready supply of wine bags made from sustainable materials. He could commission a factory to make them but he would need to order them in such huge volumes that it is not viable at this stage. So, if we are honest, Lee’s soap is already quite far down the road towards becoming a green product, but there is still, inevitably, some distance to go.

Amantee Artisan Breads at the Bangkok Farmers' Market

Houndstooth Treat at the Bangkok Farmers' Market

The Farmers' Market philosophy is not just about good food. It's also about community building. Yoga fits with this perfectly. We run a program of donation-based yoga, where we encourage participants to think of their yoga as more than just a workout session. Instead of coming, working out and going home, we like our yoga enthusiasts to interact and socialise. Which is one of the reasons why we are now offering acrobatic yoga sessions each week. Ieva, Surang and Chie put on a gravity-defying performance of acrobatic yoga at the Farmers' Market in K-Village last month, demonstrating that this form of yoga is above all about interaction, communication and trust. And this type of yoga is not just for experts. Beginners can fairly quickly get to the level where they are balancing confidently on their partner's back, feet, knees or shoulders.