Kager der smager

Written to Out to Lunch by Eric Dolphy

A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.
- Benjamin Franklin

Apologies for skipping out on last week's blog post. I have been doing a bit of consulting/interim management over the past several weeks, and last week was a watershed of sorts for the business in question. Against this background, Easter's arrival was a godsend. As Clair and his family left for their sitio near Vargem Grande on Thursday, and Marcos and his father, Adelio, and with them the fencing crew, had sadly already left on Wednesday night to attend to a death in the family, Lone and I had Alfheim to ourselves for three full days. Perfect! We worked at least half of Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but still managed to chill, watch a film (Chicago) on my MacBook and go for a couple of refreshing swims in our favorite pool in the river next to the house. We also ate very well. One of the advantages to living far from a real grocery store, and hence having little or no access to store-bought sweets, is that Lone frequently bakes cakes...two this weekend to be precise: Jamie Oliver's apple pie (Jamie's Dinners: The Essential Family Cookbook by Jamie Oliver), in which the apple was replaced by the more appropriately tropical goibada or guava, and fransk citrontærte (Danish for French lemon tart) from Kager der smager og andre søde sager (loosely translated: Tasty cakes and other sweet things), Lone's quintessential, Danish, cake recipe book.

Fortunately all of this cake consumption is generally accompanied by some pretty extreme physical labor, and this weekend was no exception. I spent Saturday morning carrying fence posts to the tippy-top of the mountain field which we are fencing for the new, enhanced hog enclosure. This time I asked Lone to take pictures in order to document my hard work for my big (skeptical) sister, Paula. Check out this sequence of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 photos, sis...and never doubt your little bro again! On Sunday, Lone joined me, carrying fence posts from the bottom of the field to the middle. From the middle, I carried them to the top. As these 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 photos illustrate, I married a true viking. In sum, their is fit, and then there is fazenda fit. For fun, I have created a scale of fence post fitness...which goes something like this (at least 15 reps or trips is required to certify and move up to the next level):

Flat terrain
Level 1: 1 light fence post
Level 2: 1 heavy fence post
Level 3: 2 light fence posts
Level 4: 2 heavy fence posts

Hilly terrain
Level 5: 1 light fence post
Level 6: 1 heavy fence post
Level 7: 2 light fence posts
Level 8: 2 heavy fence posts

Mountainous terrain
Level 9: 1 light fence post
Level 10: 1 heavy fence post
Level 11: 2 light fence posts
Level 12: 2 heavy fence posts

Clair, not surprisingly, has attained a level 12 certification, while I have not gotten past level 10.

If our farming venture fails, we often joke that we can always start a fat farm...The Biggest Loser Brazil!

Speaking of biggest losers, Muninn at last seems to be recovering from whatever illness had befallen him, but not before he had lost a ton of weight. He has morphed into nothing more than skin and bones in little more than two weeks. Fortunately, he is eating again...about six times a day to be precise. Lone has expanded his culinary repertoire from Pedigree Pal to include fresh baked bread and butter, fried eggs, tuna fish, yogurt and oats and the very best of our leftovers. This is supplemented with a small drugstore's worth of medicine. We have also begun treating all of the dogs with neem. This should increase their resistance to ticks and other parasites. The veterinarian's diagnosis was inconclusive...pneumonia or maybe a tick-borne illness. Perhaps the world's most curious orthopedic surgeon and would-be veterinarian in training, Dr. Antoine, would care to take a crack at this mystery. Muninn was bleeding consistently from his nose, had a temperature, a weak heart and showed signs of anemia, He had also all but stopped eating and was completely lethargic. Happily, he slowly appears to be regaining form and again tags along on the majority of our small jaunts around the fazenda.

In other tough animal news, we lost all but one of the Galinha-d'angola or Helmeted Guineafowl when Lone forgot to close them in one evening. Needless to say, she felt terrible. Also, one of the brooding hens who decided to lay her eggs outside of the brooding house has disappeared...along with all dozen of her eggs. She had managed to lay her eggs in a patch of high grass without any of us noticing -not even Rosana. When we did discover her nest, we decided against moving her. Clearly a poor decision. Live and learn. Strangely enough, there was no sign of a struggle, not one loose feather or egg shell shard. Whatever got her was scarily efficient.

On a more positive note, the light-brown and white-speckled hen and her nine chicks are all doing extremely well. They are out and about every day -even mixing it up with the big poultry. Not even Dan dares to mess with Big Momma when she brings her young chicks to eat some of the corn I spread in front of the main hen house twice daily.

The week before last, the stone cutter arrived on Thursday (April 2nd) and spent all of Thursday and Friday cutting a huge stone in front of the entrance to the corral into 20 * 30 cm slabs. We intend to use these slabs to build a patio behind the house, complete with covered dining area and barbecue. Ironically, the stone cutter turned out to be Baiano, one of the crew of seven who helped with the construction of the houses and storage area back in Q3 of 2008. Johannes and Esben will remember him as having made a somewhat dubious impression, constantly disappearing into the then-unfinished house on very long, very unofficial breaks, except when he was tasked with repairing the foundation of the house, a task he performed expertly, cutting small, perfectly formed stones and placing them in the gaps along the foundation. His is definitely a case of right job, right man. As this sequence of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 photos documents, everyone has their calling. What an art!

In other news, hog favela is taking shape nicely, the first ten maternity houses are ready, five of which have already been placed in the field...awaiting their pregnant tenants.

Finally, if all goes according to plan, by end of May we will have readied all seven pastures. Marcos has completed construction of all of the salt troughs, and the bebedouros or drinking troughs. All that is missing is to complete the fencing. Once the pastures are complete, we will begin a process of pasture regeneration, taking each pasture in turn out of what I expect to be a 30-plus day rotation. While resting, we will re-seed the pasture and spray using the biodynamic preparations 500 and 501. Once this process is complete, we will assess the bearing capacity of each pasture, fix the respective rotations and purchase the appropriate delta of cattle to complete our herd, which I hope will be able to reach 100 head. And speaking of cattle, the Mad Hatters have indeed tempered their wild ways. This is not to say that they are calm like Bolinha, but the Nelore have mellowed significantly, so much so that moving them from pasture 1/2 to pasture 4 on Saturday took less than 30 minutes all in, from saddling up the horses to strategically positioning people along the trail between the pastures.