"If you never did, you should. These things are fun, and fun is good."
- Dr. Seuss
We have been in a bit of a holding pattern recently, waiting for our heirloom milho (200 kg) and feijão (50 kg) to arrive. Frustratingly, our criolo seeds seem to have entered transport limbo; they left the União das Associações Comunitárias do Interior de Canguçu on July 28th and still have not arrived. If the transport company is on the up-and-up, I will pick them up this afternoon at Depósito Cursino in São Luiz do Paraitinga, where I am currently writing this blog post.
While waiting, Farm Manager Esben has been working on striking an appropriate balance between brain and brawn. The jury is still out, but everyone seems to be enjoying themselves - and that counts for a lot.
For her part, Megan continues to contribute in every way imaginable…one cannot say enough about her can-do attitude.
In the fascinating tradition of corn flakes, microwave ovens, Silly putty, Post-it notes, saccharin, Slinky, potato chips, fireworks and Play-Doh, we discovered that our bamboo chick feeding cages also make excellent pigeon traps…truly excellent. We have captured as many as 12 pigeons at a go. This discovery, coupled with the less surprising fact that hogs will consume pretty much 100% of a recently killed bird, has led us to consider trapping pigeons on a large scale. As a test, we recently fed 10 pigeons to our two groups of hogs...the hogs were unanimous in their approval. Using pigeons in this way would:
- provide our hogs with an excellent source of protein
- reduce their consumption of corn
- and help us manage the otherwise uncontrollable growth of Fazenda Alfheim's pigeon population
In another effort to feed our hogs, we picked up a bunch (as I am unsure of how many piglet equivalents, bunch seems like a suitable quantitive description for the time being) of freshly harvested organic feijão from Fazenda Santa Helena in Catuçaba. We will feed most of this feijão to our hogs and plant the rest.
Finally, last week's blog post was read 187 times, contributing to a record 519 visits to http://fazendaalfheim.blogspot.com/ during the month of August.
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