WELCOME TO BETTAWAN
My name is Wan and I am from Thailand, my daughters name is Min. We live in a little rice/sugar cane village in the middle of Thailand. We are surrounded by rice and sugarcane fields, mountains, and jungle. We recently bought some land and built a small home / work area and a drying shed where we store all our gathered leaves and other dry goods.
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My father has always used Indian Almond Leaves ( Terminalia Catappa ) Teak Leaves ( Tectona Grandis ) and Banana Leaves ( Musa Balbisiana ) for conditioning and care of his Bettas, ever since he was introduced to them by a couple of his Thai Betta Breeder friends, from the village where we live.
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Around our village, grow several Indian Almond Trees, that have been established there for many years and this is where we gather our leaves from but on the land we bought we have also planted several Indian Almond tree samplings which have all taking and are doing really well. So in the near future we will have our own supply of Indian Almond Leaves ( Terminalia Catappa ) and will not have to venture out so far gathering.
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The Leaves usually fall twice a year, the first fall which is smaller than the main fall usually happens Sept/Oct. We usually ignore this fall as it's coming to the end of the rainy season and the majority of the leaves are damaged by the last rains of the rainy season...the main fall is in Jan/Feb and these are the leaves we gather.
As the time approaches and the trees leaves start to go red, we go out and clean all the previous years other growth to make the gathering of the freshly fallen leaves easier. We go through each leave individually, all good are bagged any not so good are put into piles ( see photos of before and after cleaning ). The good bagged leaves are then taking back to the dry shed and emptied into bays for future orders.
On a evening 4/5 pm, a bag of big leaves will be sorted in the dry shed, any small leaves are put into a seperate bag and stored for future small orders. The bag is then emptied into our wash area and the leaves are gently showered and left for an hour. This gets rid of any curls and folds in the leaves that may of occured while they where drying out in the bays in the dry shed and makes the leaves fresh and workable. The leaves are then dried with damp clothes to get rid of any excess water and piled packs of 10 of similar sizes and then put into specially made presses. The presses are usually left outside for the sun to do it's work but sometimes they need to be put inside due to the weather. This process takes 2/4 days for the leaves to dry due to the weather. Once dry the leaves are boxed.
During the day most of the time is spent brushing the boxed leaves for customers orders, the leaves need to be brushed to get rid of any dust/dirt or small insects/eggs that may of got on the leaves while sun /dry pressing..any damaged leaves are put to one side and used as low grade, leaves with bits of fungus the fungus is cut out, any with lots of fungus are destroyed on the fire. So we actually spend a lot of time making sure that we supply a quality product for our customers.
We only select the best reddish-brown leaves for export, we never use hand-picked leaves, only leaves that have naturally fallen and are high in Tannin. We only supply premium leaves, our Indian Almond Leaves (Terminalia Catappa ), Teak Leaves ( Tectona Grandis ) and Banana Leaves ( Musa Balbisiana ) are 100% totally organic, no chemicals whatsoever are used on the trees. We aim to supply a fast friendly service with quality product's in a professional manner.
I thank you once again for visiting our website. The future can only get BETTA.
