Almost there!

I wrote this post in late October however earlier attempts to publish it failed - and it sat languishing for three months. Much has happened since then and very soon I'll publish two entries in order to catch up.

Almost there!

Our neighbor, Marli, has been building the walls of our cob house since I had to stop, and now two of her brothers have worked since Monday this week to put the roof over the whole house. The two bedrooms are finished, except for the final foor layers and wall plaster and Marli just completed the foundation for the living/dining area, but we’re taking a break from the cob building until we get the doors, windows and other parts together. (With the two bedrooms we got the walls most of the way up and then had to partially cut out holes for the doors and windows – a waste of energy and time.) It will be great to have the whole space covered and protected from the rain. 

Cob house with blue tarp that was up for over a year.

Cob house without any cover.

Current work on the cob house - wood structure for the tile roof.

Animal management takes a lot of our time. We get up early to feed the goats and milk Polly whose two kids spend the night enclosed in a pen away from their mother. We’re getting three cups of milk every day now. We made a difficult decision: we got rid of Nina and Daisy, and are keeping the two Nubians, Polly and Nellie. “Developed in England, the Nubian is popular among makers of cheese and ice cream because its milk is so rich. This goat comes in many colors, most typically bay or black, and is the most energetic, active, and talkative of the dairy breeds.” (Damerow, Gail, The Backyard Homestead Guide to Raising Farm Animals.) Nellie has returned from the farm where the went last month to hang out with the billy goats, and hopefully the fullness in her body means she's pregnant, expecting in February. 

The chickens require little care other than feeding them in the morning, making sure they have plenty of fresh water, releasing them late morning, gathering eggs, and enclosing them at dusk. As I described in the last post, from time to time we have to deal with a broody hen - right now we have one isolated in the cooling down pen and are only collecting two eggs a day. 

Lolita in the pit.

Then we have our pets, Lolita and the cats. Lolita tore her leg on a piece of wire and the sore was invaded by flies that lay their eggs inside. It was taking forever to heal so I took her to vet. Now she has a collar to keep her from licking her wound, and she reminds me of the RCA dog. 

Our little orphan kittens seem to be doing fine. When they're not sleeping they're all over the place, very cute.

The cats usually require almost no care but suddenly Fofa, who birthed kittens in the beginning of September, has gone missing and we have two of the cutest little devils to take care of. They’re drinking goat milk out of a bowl and eating both cat food and dog food. I miss Fofa. The other adult cat is Cindy, a pretty Calico, and she’s no trouble at all. I assume that she catches any mice who make the mistake of coming around for corn and other foodstuff. Lolita also has a job and that’s to bark when any stranger, including the monkeys, comes onto the property. She’s good at her chore, sometimes she overdoes it, but fortunately she doesn’t bite.

Lolita and Cindy.

When we moved onto this piece of land several fruit trees remained from the prior dwellers who’d lived here about fifteen years before. There were five mango trees, two China limes, a dying orange, several guavas, and five jabuticaba trees, the latter being a superb fruit endemic to Brazil that is now cultivated in many places including Florida. We’ve pruned the old trees and all of them, including the orange, are doing well. 

More limes than we can use - lemonade, salad dressing, caipirinhas, lemon bars - yumm.

Jaboticabas- a few green fruits growing on the trunk while a new set of blossoms are beginning to flower.

We’ve also planted numerous fruit trees, coffee, and a small banana grove. We picked our first coffee beans last season, and pitangas (a delicious cherry-like fruit) this year. One of the new orange trees is flowering right now as well as a pomegranate. The passion fruit vine is flowering profusely but no sign of fruit.  

Eggs and milk

October 7 , 2016

It’s 11 am and I just collected three eggs from the chicken pen as I let out the flock (three hens, one rooster, and seven 3-month-old cockerels and pullets) for free-range pasturing the rest of the day. At sunset they will go voluntarily back into the 8 x 12 ft pen to roost safely for the night. In the morning I feed them corn and keep them enclosed so that they’ll lay their eggs where we can find them.

Our chicken pen: the roosting area is protected from the rain, and there are two nests in boxes in the covered area. A passion fruit vine covers the rest of the pen, including the extension.

Last month two of the three layers went broody, meaning that their hormones changed, they stopped laying and started sitting on the nest day and night, even though we’d removed the eggs. For those who aren’t familiar with chickens, brooded eggs hatch after 21 days and the hens spend another six weeks or so protecting their chicks and keeping them warm at night, before starting another period of producing eggs. To bypass the 9-10 week brooding and little chick phase it’s necessary to break the hormonal cycle by cooling down the hen’s body which has heated up to hatch the eggs. Some say to dunk the hen in ice water, which I’ve tried several times without success. Instead we put our two hens in little elevated cages with wire bottoms and left them there for four days with only a bit of water and corn. It worked but still took another week and a half for them to start laying again – about three weeks without eggs. Any day now the third hen will probably go broody.

The separate extension provides an area for little chicks. Right now it houses six Rhode Island Red pullets.

To the left of the main chicken pen is a smaller extension (4 x 8 ft) where my six Rhode Island Red pullets live. I got them by special order in Anapolis, five day old chicks that I raised in a cage in our pantry until they were old enough to be outside. Now they’re about nine weeks old and have joined the older fowl for the run of the property where they gobble up insects, worms and bits of choice vegetation. Thanks to Grace’s work in January and February we have two enclosed garden areas for our vegetables, protected from the chickens.  Two or three months from now nine pullets will begin laying eggs, and we’ll finally attain our goal of all the eggs we can eat plus plenty to share.

The Rhode Island Reds grazing in the open range - enclosed veggie garden (fallow now at the end of the dry season)
and the goat pen in the background.

Our newborns, doeling at left and buckling at right. (Guy's photo)

Polly, one of our original goats, nursing her newborns (Sept.20th) Guy's photo

This morning we started milking Polly, the mama goat. Eighteen days ago she delivered two kids, a buckling and a doeling. This is her second birthing and we hope to get more milk, three or four cups a day, which is enough for our needs when it’s just the two of us here. Guy and I have learned to house and feed and to milk the goats in the past year, since June 2015 when we got our first two pregnant does. Our little herd is up to six and one of the does that was born here is off at a neighbor’s to get pregnant from one of his billy goats. We don’t have enough space to keep a buck.

2011: Clearing the old foundation - a jabuticaba and a mango tree.

2012: another angle, a second jabuticaba tree; babassu palms in the background.

We’re entering our sixth year on the farm. The photos above show our land before we started building anything. Now our brick and mortar house sits on the old foundation we cleared, and just beyond the little jaboticaba tree on the other side of the foundation we’re building our cob house. I plan to write an update on the cob house very soon – hopefully by the end of the month we’ll have a roof!

Guy sitting in our future sitting room. The foundation was completed last week. 

The first house, brick and mortar, completed in November 2012. The two houses face each other.

Catching Up

March

Cerrado flower (photo by Sofia Hart)

Posts on this blog show that since December we've been busy with our guests, Grace and Jaqi. What does entertaining and hospitality have to do with permaculture and saving the cerrado? Why fill these blog pages with stories about our guests and the adventures we share?

The second guest room in the cob house

From the start of our experiment here I’ve thought of Scott and Helen Nearing as an inspiration for us (see post from September 7, 2012). In the nineteen sixties and seventies they received scores of young people who worked on their farm in Vermont, learning the skills of homesteading and organic farming. Now the world is seeing a new back-to-the-earth movement as people, especially the young, look for ways to take back from huge agrobusiness the production of food and the care of the soil, water, seeds, plants, animals, and forests. Our tiny part in the movement puts us in the position of offering a place for people to examine what it means to live on the earth sustainably, and to begin to learn alongside us some of the skills to do so.

The Cerrado comprises a large little-known biome covering the central states of Brazil, including the vast highlands where we live. We want to introduce the Cerrado to our friends, show it to you through this blog, and welcome guests that would like to get to know first hand this amazing and beautiful place. 

Sofia gathers grasses on a high spot near our farm.

Why have I called this blog Save the Cerrado? According to our Wildlife Conservation Society book, Birds of Brazil, The Pantanal and Cerrado of Central Brazil:

            Though barely known to foreigners or even many Brazilians, the Cerrado    is a national treasure. It has one one the greatest plant biodiversities of any savanna in the world … But all will vanish if the march of industrail agriculture is permitted to continue across all of what was once the wild Cerrado.

A gathering of macaws (photo by Sofia Hart)

In early March Guy and I took our guests, Grace and Jaqi, to a magical parkland area north of us, the Chapada dos Veadeiros, in the heart of the Cerrado. We spent two nights in Sao Jorge, a little town on the edge of the National Park, and from there we went out to visit waterfalls and a hot springs.

Chapada dos Veadeiros grasslands (photo by Guy Gray)

Jaqi and Grace in the rocky wilds of Chapada dos Veadeiros.

Vale da Lua (Moon Valley)

Jaqi and Greta in hot springs - delicious! (photo by Guy Gray)

Grace at São Bento Falls

Guy took a swim.

The bamboo dwarfs Grace.

Before Jaqi left on March 15, we took a couple of walks right where we live, the first to a hill from where you can see 360 degrees of the horizon.

Cerrado flowers on the hill

The second walk was through the woods on the farm, and down to a little waterfall on the stream, Areias, that gives the farm its name, Fazenda Areias.

This stream, the Areias, is one of the borders of the farm.

The second part of March was now just the three of us, Grace, Guy and I. After we dropped Jaqi off at the airport we went to a nursery in Brasilia to purchase several trees for the farm: two bougainvillea trees, one with white flowers, the other with purple, and a tiny mangaba sapling, one of my favorite cerrado fruits.

Final news for March: Grace sliced open her toe on a rock in the creek. She got to try out the emergency room in Cocalzinho where she received free treatment courtesy of Brazil's government single payer health system.

Stitches.

Catching up

February

At the time we were happy to see the rains decline to a shower here or there most days of the week. We continuted to meaure the rainfall in our flat plastic cup atop the pole that supports an antenna for phone reception (photo below, taken on January 26).  

A full cup of rain water, one day's worth, about 8 cm or just over 3 inches.

As long as the total for the season adds up to 120 centimeters (about 47 inches) we could relax. By the beginning of February we had, counting from November 5, 71.5 cm or 28 in (55 in January alone), and two to three more months of the rainy season. I’m writing with hindsight in mid-April and you can probably guess how this story will go. But we were thoroughly enjoying February weather.

The four of us go to Brasilia.

Carnaval (Brazilian spelling) came early and while we couldn’t all trek down to Rio or Salvador for the famous street displays, we went into Brasilia for a day and night.

Brasilia, the nation’s capital since 1960, has drawn people from all around the country, who brought with them their own regional traditions, foods, and festivals. On a Monday afternoon we joined the colorful parade, a wild medley of costumes, political statements, people of all ages including families with children, following the various musical groups, some marching, others truck-borne, dancing, shuffling, laughing, drinking water, soda, beer, singing along with the well-known Carnaval lyrics.

Guy's camera lens is splattered with beer sprayed by revelers.

Part of the fun for the men is wearing bras and big butts.

Jaqi gets into the mood.

Grace and the red man.

In the evening Jaqi opted to stay in while Grace, Guy and I walked a few miles down the major central freeway, closed to traffic for the revelers, and joined thousands of young people in a louder, harder rocking version of the Carnaval parade. We were something of an anomaly, Grace taller than almost anyone else, and Guy and I older by thirty years. We kept getting requests for photographs, young people gathering around us to pose with their grandparents. One young man asked me to stick out my tongue for a photo and I said I wouldn’t. “Why not?!” Everybody does it! “It’s a generational thing,” I said with a smile. “Oh,” he nodded and that was that. Good cheer all around, lots of beer and laughter, young bodies seeking each other out, dancing, kissing, running after each other, colors, costumes, masks, the darkening night.

Grace, Guy and Greta ready to hit the street. 

Back on the farm Grace was building a fence for the second small garden we’d used in the past but now was open to the chickens we started to raise last year. The chickens eat the insects that plague the garden but they also eat the young vegetables.

Grace has developed some building skills.

Jaqi adds some moral support.

 Now that the chickens, cats and dogs can't get in, the garden can be prepared with compost. 

We took a day off to go to the Salto do Corumba waterfall, formed by the Corumba River that flows past Cocalzinho. We pass this fall all the time, on our way to Anapolis, Pirenopolis, and the little city of Corumba, but we’ve not been particularly interested in the recreation and camping area at the foot of the falls. We expected it to be unacttractive, unkempt and noisy, with trash left behind by weekend campers. But when we asked around in town people told us it was definitely worth a visit.

So after lunch in town we drove about ten miles to the entrance to the recreation area, paid our R$ 20 entrance fee (US$ 5.50 – half price for seniors),  and wandered in to a delightful place, clean and nicely laid out and landscaped. Our main goal was the mile hike up to the base of the falls, along a well-developed but steep and rocky path. You’ll see from the photos that it was well worth the effort.

Grace and Jaqi rest along the river below the falls.

Guy takes in the full view of the falls.

February brought a crisis on the goat front: for weeks a lump had been growing on Nina’s flank, and we’d asked several neighbors to opine on it, receiving reassurance each time that it was no problem, it would come to a head and burst and then we should clean and treat it. When it finally opened,  thick pus, hard, almost an inch in diameter, pushed out slowly. 

The access on Nina's flank comes open, releasing the thick cheesy pus.

Guy checked our goat manuals and discovered the dire diagnosis: Caseous lymphadenitis (CLA), an uncurable, highly contagious disease that plagues goats and sheep, causing considerable damage to larger herds. We isolated Nina, called the city vet, and were somewhat reassured by his recommendations: keep her isolated, clean the pus out thoroughly, treat with antiseptics, give her a broadspectrum antibiotic, and sterilize the pen where she’d been with the other three goats.  The short of the story is that soon our second goat developed symptoms and we isolated her as well. Our neighbor, experienced with sheep, took over their care, and several weeks later we are tentatively moving ahead with the understanding that we have infected goats, perhaps an infected herd (of 4), that can probably live a fairly normal life, with new goats and milk, as long as we take all the necessary precautions. An analogy I came across in our books, that living with caseous lynphadenitis is like living with tuberculosis, helps me to understand what we’re dealing with.

These young trees still need to be watered during the dry season. Most of them are two or three years old.

It ended up raining very little in February, but hopefully there were still the rains in March and April to reach the 150 cm we need to carry us over – the water table, the trees and pastures, the reservoirs that supply the cities and provide electricity – until the rains come again in September or October.