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By pigwhisperer, June 13, 2010

It is June and the coffee cherries are beginning to ripen. This is early for us–usually the cherries ripen in early August–so the coffee harvest will begin this week. We have six people coming to pick the ripe coffee cherries tomorrow. Hopefully we will have more people helping us with the harvest next week.

É Junho, e os grãos de café estão começando a amadurecer. Geralmente as cerejas amadurecem no início de agosto. Mas em 2010, a colheita do café vai começar esta semana. Temos seis pessoas que vêm para catar o café maduro amanhã. Esperamos ter mais pessoas nos ajudando com a colheita na próxima semana.

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By pigwhisperer, April 24, 2010

Some Alice in Wonderland creatures found on the farm. The first, mushrooms. The second, caterpillars. (The caterpillars are not smoking hookahs, unfortunately.)

Algumas criaturas de Alice no País das Maravilhas foram encontradas aqui na fazenda. A primeira foto, cogumelos. A segunda, lagartas. (Infelizmente as lagartas não estão fumando hookas).

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By pigwhisperer, March 21, 2010

It’s jaca season again. Yum. There is nothing like opening a ripe jaca (or jackfruit as it’s called in English) and eating the meaty yellow bulbs surrounding its seeds. They are delicious: sweet, a little tangy (their acid leaves a tingling sensation in your mouth), and really fragrant. If a jaca is really ripe, then it’s much TOO fragrant for some, smelling a little like rotten fruit.

Jacas came to Brazil from India. I suppose the Portuguese brought them and they’ve been around ever since. We have thousands of trees on the farm. The jaca is the largest tree-borne fruit in the world. They can apparently reach 80 pounds in weight and up to 36 inches long and 20 inches in diameter. The fruit’s skin is prickly and has a really sticky, milky sap when cut open. If the sap gets on your hands (and it usually does if you’re eating the fruit) you can’t just wash it off, but must use oil (olive oil, canola, etc.) to rub it off.

There are two kinds of jaca trees here: dura (hard) and mole (soft). A jaca dura tree produces fruit whose pulp is, you guessed it, harder than the mole’s pulp. It is impossible to tell just by looking at a tree which kind it is. I’ve tried and tried. You basically have to eat the fruit off the tree to know. There are great debates here (no, really, there are) about which kind of jaca is best–mole or dura. Mole is sweeter but has to be consumed right away. Dura lasts longer, and can be made into jam. I guess if you’re a die-hard mole lover, you subscribe to the “live in the moment” philosophy of life. While dura lovers like to take their time, enjoy things slowly, make things last as long as they can. I’m like our pigs–I like jacas any way I can get them.

Here’s a nice article about the jackfruit.

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By pigwhisperer, March 13, 2010

One of our goals this year was to open up overgrown areas. In these cleaned areas, we’ll plant coffee seedlings this May. Our coffee plants like shade, so we keep as many trees as possible. The photo above is a picture of recently cleaned area of the farm. We’re so excited about all of the trees and planting space! If you look closely, you can spot Lorenzo in the background. This particular area is on a steep incline very far up the mountain. It was a tough hike to get there, and by the end Lorenzo and I were both looking for excuses to stop and catch our breath.

Um dos nossos objetivos este ano era a abertura de zonas de mato brabo. Nessas áreas limpas, vamos planta mudas de café em maio deste ano. Nossas mudas de café gostam de sombra, então tentamos manter todas as árvores no local. A foto acima é um retrato de uma área recentemente limpa. Estamos encantados com as árvores e o espaço! Se você olhar de perto, você pode ver nosso cão Lorenzo. Para chegar nesta área subimos uma ladeira valente. Foi uma caminhada difícil, e no final Lorenzo e eu estávamos procurando desculpas para parar e tomar fôlego.

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By pigwhisperer, March 1, 2010

We harvested our first head of broccoli today. Isn’t she a beauty? We sauteed her in some fresh chicken broth, garlic, and a little bit of anchovy paste. Delicious! Next up, cauliflower.

Colhemos nosso primeiro brócolis hoje. Ele é lindo, não é? Cozinhamos o brócolis com caldo de galinha, alho, e um pouco de pasta de anchova. Uma delícia!

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By pigwhisperer, January 10, 2010

It’s cashew season! The cashew is a tree in the Anacardiaceae family. The pulp is sweet but very acidic. We drink a lot of cashew juice this time of year, but it’s available year-round in frozen packets in the grocery store. The cashew nut is actually a seed. It’s surrounded by a shell lined with a highly toxic anacardic acid, so you can’t eat the nuts right off the tree. The acid must be burned off first. Some people use the seed’s acid to create home-made tatoos on their skin, but I don’t recommend this. (I have yet to see a really pretty caju-tatoo; they all look like burns.)

We feed the pulpy parts to our pigs and goats, and then collect the seeds. In the past we’ve sold the seeds, but this year we hope to roast them and feed the finished nuts to our pigs. This will, hopefully, give their meat a nice flavor.

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By pigwhisperer, November 11, 2009

Mexican food is our weakness. In July, we planted pepper seeds: Giant Ancho, Anaheim, Habanero, Poblano, Jalepeño. We added some tomatillos to the mix (purple and green) and hope to make some amazing salsa verde before 2010. This is one of our baby Giant Anchos. Isn’t he a fox?

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By pigwhisperer, September 25, 2009

When you were little and wondered about the intimate workings of the world, didn’t many of you turn to a trusted adult in your lives and ask, sheepishly, “Where do coffee beans come from?”

Of course you did. When you asked, you might have heard many stories, some true, some false. Coffee beans are not delivered by storks. They do not appear on doorsteps, swaddled in Starbucks bags. And, sadly, when a daddy coffee bean really loves a mommy bean, they do not make a baby bean. I really wish this were the case.

Here’s the real story: Coffee beans grow on trees. Actually, these trees look more like shrubs but they grow pretty tall. The coffee plant is a woody perennial evergreen belonging to the Rubiaceae family. There are two main species of coffee grown today: Arabica and Robusta. Robusta coffee plants are hardier, produce beans with higher caffeine content but, for the most part, inferior taste. Arabica plants grow at higher elevations and are more labor-intensive plants to raise, but their beans are denser and more flavorful. Our coffee trees are Arabica typica.

Three to five years after a coffee seedling is planted, it begins to produce white flowers. Our trees flower in December, which is summer time in Brazil. Arabica coffee trees are self-pollinating (hermaphrodites) whereas Robusta coffee trees plant depends on cross-pollination (plant sex; those devils!). Three to four months after a coffee flower is fertilized, the coffee fruit begins to grow. Here’s a very cool animation about the goings-on inside a coffee bean during its development.

When the coffee cherries turn red we pick them. It’s harvest time now, so we’re doing a lot of picking each day. Then, each evening from 4 PM until about 8 PM, after the coffee cherries are picked, we “process” the coffee. What does this mean? That’s the next stage of the bean’s life, and I’ll post it next week.

Thanks for reading.
xoxo
Frances

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By pigwhisperer, July 19, 2009

Oi gente. Este será meu primeiro post em português!

Na quinta-feira passada visitamos a Estação Ecológica do Tapacurá, pertencente à Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco (UFRP). Situada perto do no município de Chã de Alegria, a Estação Ecológica realiza atividades de produção de mudas de espécies florestais da Mata Atlântica, com destaque para o pau-brasil. Recebemos 3,500 mudas de pau-brasil para plantar na nossa fazenda. Apesar de termos muitas árvores indígenas na fazenda, queremos criar um programa de reflorestação do pau-brasil aqui em Pernambuco. Doaremos 500+ mudas para o Município de Taquaritinga do Norte.

O que é pau-brasil? Seu nome científico é Caesalpinia echinata Lamarck. Os índios o usavam na produção de seus arcos e flechas e na pintura de enfeites. A árvore tem uma madeira bastante valorizada, e a sua resina vermelha era utilizado para tingir roupas. Na época da colonização, essa tinta do pau-brasil criou uma demanda enorme na Europa, o que forçou uma devastadora “caça” ao pau-brasil. Hoje em dia, a árvore se encontra na lista do IBAMA de espécies ameaçadas de extinção.

No site da InfoEscola, eles falam que “o pau-brasil era considerado extinto, quando em 1928 verificou-se a existência de uma árvore de pau-brasil em um lugar denominado Engenho São Bento, hoje Estação Ecológica da Tapacurá.” Então nossas mudas de pau-brasil são filhotes desse pau-brasil que sobreviveu a caça dos séculos 16 e 17.

Muitos livros dizem que o nome “Brasil” foi derivado da árvore. Mas encontrei vários artigos que negam essa teoria. Um deles, escrito por o Professor Pedro Paulo A. Funari, da UNICAMP, fala que: “As mais antigas grafias, como “Ho Brasile”, “O’Brasil”, demonstram tratar-se de um nome celta, grupo de línguas da Irlanda e País de Gales (Reino Unido), cujo sentido seria “Terra dos bem-afortunados”, “Ilha da Felicidade” ou “Terra Prometida”, já que a raiz bres, em irlandês, significa “nobre, sortudo, feliz, encantado” e esse nome conviria bem a uma ilha imaginária a oeste do mundo conhecido, na mentalidade medieval.”

Acho que gosto mais desta teoria da mítica ilha medieval. Amanhã começamos plantar nossas mudas de pau-brasil, árvore nobre e especial.

Abraços,
Frances