A perfect house

Written to The Best of by Radiohead

His house was perfect whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. Evil things did not come into that valley.
- J.R.R. Tolkien

Construction of the new house picked up steam this week. Marcos placed the initial order for building materials and 48 hours later the material was delivered -a day after the delivery of 5 m3 of road paving material. The fact that Marcos & Co. paved the driveway and built a storage shed prior to commencing construction helped immeasurably. As a result, Marcos, his father and their new companheiro were able to accelerate their progress tangibly. In truth, Marcos was relieved to get started. It took us several weeks to choose the location for the new house...much longer than anticipated. Prior to this job, all other construction projects at Alfheim have involved improvements to or extensions of existing buildings. Lastly, construction is synonymous with the moving of cinder blocks, and here Pelle and his friend, Freddy, pitched in in a big way.

Progress on Hogwood also moved ahead rapidly. The four pens should be completed in the first half of this week. When complete, Hogwood will comprise an initial holding area, a large area for the boar(s) and the breeding sows, a feeding area which we can enter unencumbered by the descendants of Sus scrofa and a finishing area. Until we discover the holy grail of safe hog birthing, we will breed smaller numbers at a time...and continue with our open-air approach, which sustained its 100% success rate. The eight newly-christened Corinthians (for their coloring) returned to the hog pen...as did all but one gilt, who mysteriously disappeared. She seems to have escaped from the hog pen, and no one has been able to figure out how. Hopefully she will turn up in the next week or two with a litter of healthy piglets in tow. The open air approach involves releasing the pregnant gilt/sow from the hog pen just before she bursts, her finding a suitable birthing locale and building a nest, the birth itself, four-eight days of nursing and her returning to the main hog pen when the piglets are sufficiently hardened.

And speaking of hardened, Chiquina continues to amaze. Her daily intake has been reduced to two times two bottles of milk, supplemented with organic corn, which we keep in the laundry room, close to the kitchen door, where she arrives like clockwork twice daily for feeding. Muninn is keen to play with Chiquina, who except when crawling on him when he is lying down, shows little interest in canine companionship.

Somewhat less hardy were the boys, who after an initial spurt of activity curtailed their workload considerably: Esben hurt his knee so he was relegated to kitchen detail...Martha Stewart beware, Pelle and Freddy relaxed by playing Dungeons & Dragons and Brian got in touch with his inner seamstress.

Less hardy still is one of our heifers, which has become very weak and has been lying down a lot. We lost a heifer a couple of weeks back after it suffered from similar symptoms. Unfortunately, we basically have no clue as to what happened, though our lack of solid data has done little to diminish the speculation among our workers, which is rampant and ranges from poor pastures to poisonous plants. Márcio, who certainly knows cattle, visited us for lunch on Sunday and was kind enough to take a look at the heifer in question, but his conclusion was equally inconclusive. On Monday Lone called M.V.Ms.Sc. Leslie Almeida, our homeopathic veterinarian, and she recommended isolating the animal and supplementing its grazing with napié, a species of of tall perennial grass, and organic corn.

Ironically, the various problems with the hogs, e.g. miíases, and cattle, e.g. malaise, have strengthened my belief in biodynamics. The reason for my buttressed conviction is that we see the impact of the forces that regulate life and growth on a daily basis -and the importance of taking a unified approach to agriculture. For example, while all of our caipim limão is healthy, the plants that are local to our property suffer no rust whatsoever. The Duroc hogs are infinitely more robust than the F1, a cross between Large White and Landrace; the Durocs have never suffered from miíase, while they are common in the F1. Also, the darker, thicker-haired Duroc do not suffer from sunburn. Our future hog breeding stock will be chosen exclusively from the red-orange and black piglets.

In the case of the Nelore, a breed known for its hardiness, I am convinced that our herd will improve as the cattle acclimatize to our pastures -and we improve the soil- and through selective breeding.

Finally, Lone and Esben, bad knee and all, completed measuring and marking pasture 7 (404 fence posts required, approx. 6.3 hectares), so the boys have their marching orders for the week.