Planting season arrives

Written to Sigh No More by Mumford & Sons

"I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!"
-- Dr. Seuss

As mentioned in last week's blog post, we have been waiting for:

• our heirloom seeds to arrive (√)
• for the cold to lift (√)
• for us to complete the re-clearing of pasture 3 (√)
• and finally minguante or the waning moon (√)

With all of the above boxes finally ticked, on Wednesday, August 25th, we began the slow process of planting, initially non-hybrid corn on pasture 3. Based on input from a number of reliable individuals who farm using comparable techniques, and despite Clair's misgivings, we are sowing 5 plants per linear meter, which requires 3-4 seeds per hole, each approx. 3 cm deep, and spacing of 80-90 cm between rows. This should yield approx. 50,000 plants per hectare if the Gods smile on us. We have 10 working days to plant before the moon begins to wax again, after which we will have to wait until September 24th, October 23rd and November 22nd to continue planting corn and feijão. The benefit of planting by the moon, aside from the obvious, is that it spreads our planting season over four months, hopefully ensuring that if the worst happens, bird ravaging or excessively heavy rains, we will lose only a portion of our crops…7-9-13!

It is worth mentioning that our single-digit mornings have necessitated some extreme measures -and clothing. The getup seen here is a combination of sports apparel I purchased in Norway for working out during winter in Oslo! For the better part of the past month I have needed every thread of it on my 6 km morning runs.

In other farm news:

• lots of new, healthy piglets have been born recently
  
• the calves are thriving -and too cute for words
• The prefeito of Natividade da Serra, João Carvalho, at last paid a visit to Fazenda Alfheim -no doubt prompted by my numerous exchanges with Dra. Renata Vita, Promotora de Justiça de Paraibuna- and promised to repair the road between Vargem Grande and our fazenda by mid September
  
• Esben continues to work at an impressive clip, but also appears to be enjoying himself
• our half-walled barn is progressing splendidly
• and Megan continues to contribute with equal portions of hard work and good humor
  

And in a tale worthy of a place on thatsweird.net, we removed a twig from Negão's right eye, which somehow managed to get lodged there while he was out running, penetrating his cornea, ciliary muscle and vitreous humor. I took this photo next to our home telephone to give people a sense of the twig's length…simply staggering, even more so because he appears to be recovering without a hitch. They don't make city dogs like that!

Finally, a well-deserved shout-out to Sara Geld, who recently returned from the XIII FINA World Masters (Swimming) Championship 2010 in Göteborg and Borås, Sweden, with two 8th place finishes!

Waiting for Godot…and discovering

Written to Live in Darwin, Australia by by Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu

"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.