Let it rain

Written to This Guy's in Love by Steve Tyrell

If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.
- AMAZING HUMAN FACTS

Beginning at approx. 14:00 on Wednesday, March 18th, it rained 124 mm in less than 24 hours! It rained so much that Lone was forced to empty her precision, German Regenmesser rainwater measuring apparatus in order to keep it from running over. To put this rainfall in perspective, London receives an average annual rainfall of 584 mm! We could not even take photos it was raining so hard...but perhaps this photo of the flattened vegetation along one of the river beds will give you all an idea of both the amount and force of the water.

Not sure if the rain has anything to do with it, but the number and variety of butterflies on display at Alfheim has gone up several notches in the last while. Take a look at this one...and this one. And what about this one...not a butterfly, but certainly a candidate for fauna of the week.

Light-brown and white-speckled mother hen's eggs hatched this week. First four, then four or five more. We think there are eight or nine in all. That brings our poultry total to....a lot.

The chickens have also discovered that hanging out with the hogs is the surest route to a tasty meal.

In other animal news, Muninn has been a little under the weather this week. Not sure why, but he is very, very lethargic.

The new fencers, Wilson and Vincente, made good progress despite the rain...113 fence posts in all. Unlike Chico and Martins, they dig down all of the fence posts before adding the barbed-wire. They are not quite as fast as Chico and Martins, and they cost 75% more, but they seem like nice fellows and the quality of their work appears to be the equal of their predecessors'. Unfortunately, fencing means moving fence posts. I have to remind myself that we will only have to do this once every 15 years!

We recently bought 600 130 cm high fence posts (as opposed to the normal 220 cm high fence posts for cattle pastures) for the enhanced pig pen. It is in this area that we plan to place the sows' maternity houses. Marcos built a prototype of my design this week. Still a few adjustments to be made, but soon the landscape behind the current pig pen will be populated with ten to 20 hog maternity houses. That is nearly as many houses as in all of Vargem Grande. We have already purchased all of the construction material. We assume that all of the gilts are pregnant because the older boar has been leaving them in peace, a break from his past practice. Not sure why, but we continue to be surprised by how well nature organizes everything. I cannot count the number of people who have told us to separate the boars from the pregnant females, and I could never understand why: surely the boars know, and the females can take care of themselves -not to mention their soon-to-be offspring. Our thinking was confirmed when we recently stumbled across the following text in one of our biodynamic handbooks, Bio-Dynamic Farming Practice, by Friedrich Sattler and Eckard Wistinghausen:

If pigs are to be kept in groups of several breeding sows with boar and piglets until weaned, adequate space is needed and the animals must be used to each other.

The prototype maternity house is open along the bottom, allowing the piglets to avoid being crushed should a momma sow inadvertantly lie on one or more of them...something they rarely do. We have also decided not to build a raised floor, putting the animals in direct contact with the ground; sow's stomachs are very sensitive when nursing, and plywood can cause irritation or worse. We will close them in completely for the first five-six days after birth, after which they will be allowed to roam freely. We are expecting the piglets to be born towards the end of May, beginning of June.

Another interesting tidbit from the same book:

The sun takes 25,920 years to move through the whole zodiac. A human being takes the same number of breaths (25,920) in a 24-hour day.

In other, non-animal news, Marcos spent the whole of the week inside, out of the rain, building shelves in the two suites in our house. The beta results are very rustic, but exactly what we were looking for.

Marcos' father, Adilio, meanwhile, spent most of the week closing the gap between the top of the walls and the roof in Clair and Rosana's house. Should make winter considerably more bearable.

Finally, under the headline of depressing but true, take a look at the U.S. NATIONAL DEBT CLOCK. Refresh the page three or four times and watch the debt grow!