Silk village and around Hoi An

Spinning silk thread, it takes 50 threads (from 50 cocoons) to make one silk thread

Cham style weaving, a mixture of silk and cotton with bright patterns

No space is left to waste, most houses use their yards for vegetable gardens, the Vietnamese eat a lot of greens

Picking greens for our lunch, we ate at Baby Mustard which is in the middle of a large farming area.  All the food is very fresh.

We cycled around Hoi An and area yesterday.  Cycling is a lot safer than scooter riding.  We cycled through the city streets, which was an adventure.  Once you learn that an empty space in traffic is the cue to go, then things go well.  The biggest problem is when vehicles turn right, they do not look or yield, they just keep going and pull out into the street, no matter their size or whether there are other vehicles already in that space!
Once we left the city and cycled around the residential and farm areas, it was very peaceful.  This area has a large organic farm and most Vietnamese have plots of land to grow rice and they grow veggies in their gardens.  They collect grass from the river and bury it to use as fertilizer in their gardens.  The larger farms are communes.  Fruit and vegetables are very abundant and fresh in Vietnam and if you don't grow your own, there are many markets and roadside vendors to buy them from.
We also visited the silk village where they showed you the process of making silk from the eggs to the finished product.  Most silk is made from intact cocoons, which are harvested before the moth emerges.  They boil the cocoon which allows the silk strand to be unwound, it is then added to many others (from 10 to 100 depending on the quality) to form silk thread.  The boiling also kills the pupae which they eat, I tried one, it tastes like potato.
Raw silk is made from the cocoons that the moth emerges from, the strands are broken.  They let 20% of the moths hatch for breeding, they mate, lay eggs and die.  The moths cannot fly.   The eggs hatch, they feed the worms for several weeks, then they make their cocoon which is harvested.
The silk is then woven on the looms, it can be mixed with cotton as the Cham do.

boiling the cocoons to make silk thread

gathering grass to use as fertilizer