In Isaan, Thailand, home (โฮม) means bringing good things together in one place (มาโฮมกัน).
With food, seeds, soil, and clay, we are growing a home. We are Peggy and Jo Jandai and welcome to Ma Hom. Here is a place where we learn how to make an easier life on land.
Our project is a new one and an old one at the same time. We are the co-founders of Pun Pun learning center, organic farm, and community in northern Thailand north of Chiang Mai city. Through lots of experimentation, we transformed a degraded piece of land into a thriving ecosystem that feeds people year-round. Decades of trying things out has taught us that food grows community. Over 20 years, we’ve hosted hundreds of courses and thousands of volunteers from all over the world, finding ways to live better together.
We like to get creative about living. One thing we’ve learned over the years is that building houses builds resilience. We’ve helped build hundreds of adobe houses across Thailand, spreading a culture of self-made earthen homes. Through courses and books, we continue to share techniques to make it easier, cheaper, and more accessible for people to create their own shelter in their own context.
We believe that saving seeds saves culture. Through decades of collecting, growing, saving, and freely sharing seeds, we’ve restored hundreds of ancestral seed varieties. We’ve built a network of seed savers within Thailand called Common Seed (https://web.facebook.com/PublicSeedFunds) and grown a culture that keeps seeds within the hands of communities.
We’ve been lucky to work with people from all over the world planning and co-creating land-based projects together and sharing how simple it can be to take care of the land and each other.
Now, we’re bringing our experience and dreams to a new place. And we’re making space to continue learning together. Our first course is a Living Design Course because we all know we all need food, water, housing, air. We also need beauty, fun, community, and rest. And we have to make some amount of money to live. How do we look at all of these things together? How do we start to design our own lives? We feel the most exciting thing is to look at our lives as a whole, like a landscape, and think creatively about what we want to make of it.
This three-day course is hosted at our rural farmstead and collaborative learning space. It’s a chance to learn how to embrace the freedom that comes with choosing for ourselves. We’ll build foundational knowledge of living systems. We’ll share lessons learned from doing — from decades of personal experience building homes, saving seeds, growing food, gathering/filtering water, cultivating community, living between places. And we’ll get our hands dirty and experiment together.
This course will run in English on Oct 23-25, 2026 and Dec 11-13, 2026, and in Thai Feb 12-14, 2027.
Topics include:understanding our basic needs
- • How to understand soil, different types, their purpose and how to increase fertility.
- • How to source, harvest, store, and filter water for various needs.
- • Understanding plants, where and what we want to grow, and how to design your garden for optimal growth.
- • How to understand pests: their habits and characteristics and how to design to live together to maintain abundance in our gardens.
- • Basic principles of earthen building and home design, how to design and apply different materials for optimal comfort and longevity. Making and applying clay paints.
- • The course also includes hands-on practice; tending to and planting in the garden together, harvesting, and making products using produce from the gardens.
Sign-up for the English courses is at: Living Design Course Registration EN and for the Thai courses at: Living Design Course Registration TH The total cost is 6,500 baht/person ($195 US), which includes all instruction, meals, accommodation, and transportation from and back to Chiang Mai. Ma Hom has two earthen homes on site. All participants will stay with us in these homes together. We’ll set you up with a thin mattress, sheets, pillow, blanket, and mosquito net.
Feel free to reach out with any questions or needs at mahom.info@gmail.com
We hope to get a chance to play and learn together with you.
For more info on Ma Hom check out our page at linktr.ee/ma.hom, follow our instagram page @mahom_cholae, or Jon’s youtube page at https://www.youtube.com/@JonJandaiLifeisEasy
Written by Peggy Reents
