My belly is cheeping

Mi panza está piando.

There are three birds inside my t-shirt, a little yellow female duckling, and two chicks, green and purple, of unknown sex. They are hiding from the cold world as it rains outside, and as the gross color of city lights on smog replaces the stunning blue of the daytime sky (okay, it's only stunning if you look straight upward, because from any more oblique angle you can see the sewage-coloured film of smog between you and the stratosphere even on the clearest of days...).

I think the duck just pooped in my belly button. I guess it's a shower night.

Today's post is about livestock management. Clearly, integrated livestock management in the city involves two important details:

1. Reading the newspaper a couple times a week, and
2. Eating more greens.

And sharing your t-shirt with infant poultry, of course, but that's just a bonus. The newspaper element is all about substrate: it's the floor of their "corral" (aka wooden fruit crate I shamelessly dug out of the garbage-- more on the dumpster diving schtick later), plus I shred it up on top so that they have something semi-comfy to sleep on/search for food under, which is their favorite pastime, other than escaping and consequently freaking out. The part about greens is good for your health but also about creating lots of stems and funky gnar leaves for the chicks to eat (which is amusing to watch as they have not mastered the technique and spend a lot of time throwing around the tiny bits of green stuff). I feel like it's good practice for the steady diet of scraps they will soon be getting.

In economic terms, these animals are not at all expensive: initial investment of animals + a kilo of feed ran me fifty pesos, a bit over four bucks. I'm still using the same feed. Since the corral was dumpster dived, the infrastructure has cost me zilch (though during the day I put them in one of my planter boxes on the roof so they can have some "fresh" air and a bit more space... regardless of which I will not include the cost of building that planter box in the analysis), but the newspaper investment is not negligible: i pay ten pesos (slightly less than a dollar) per paper (for good quality reporting and quality and quantity of newsprint: the cheapest bullshit newspaper you can get runs at three pesos, but it's about a third to half the total paper of La Jornada, Mexico's best newspaper, the one that all the intellectuals read and it's kind of crappy quality paper, all color-printing too, so NOT absorbent), and I've got to buy one every three days or so. So we're talking about thirty pesos a week and I haven't figured out what to do with the used paper. Right now it's all rolled up in another, smaller fruit crate that both chicks are very capable of escaping from. Ideas would be appreciated; otherwise I'll have to throw it out. Maybe I can find something to mulch. Furthermore I don't know what to do for nesting substrate once they get older. I'm planning to build them a little laying hutch in one of the wooden things, using the wooden tray (1m x .5m, 5 cm deep) as the nest and then constructing some kind of angled roof out of wood and Congling the sucker with Tetrapak milk cartons. Thoughts on the matter would be appreciated.

Finally, the topic of the richness of the garbage. This is a middle-class neighborhood, so people throw a lot of shit out. At about ten AM on weekdays, you can hear the chubby ponytailed garbage guy holler, "BASURAAAAAAAAAA" in the parking lot, where he waits around with his little garbage cart. with big objects tied around it, from which blessed apparatus I have scored the following:

1. A coffee table
2. A strange and ugly piece of furniture of which I will eventually post a photo and which I use as a nightstand
3. Three fruit crates (a little one and two big ones)
4. a stool base with no seat
5. a giant waterbottle which is now a pot for salad plants.

The Universe provides. Marcos and I are scheming of ways to get into the dump (which is right across the street) to go on more advanced dives. Further updates as information becomes available.
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Okay y'all, that's the latest on Hacienda Mixiuhca. Be safe, be courteous.

Hacienda Mixiuhca: Cultivo y Cría Clandestina

Okay, so my 6 square meter farm is still kind of theoretical at the moment, but it's definitely in the works. So I live in one of those soviet-style groundscraper complexes, but what we've got aside from a really lovely looking and smelling magenta rose in the parking lot is a cage on the roof for drying clothes. This is the space I have to work with; it is my hacienda.

Hacienda Mixiuhca is rather unimpressive at the moment, with four tomato seedlings (Cherokee Purples! "imported" from la Gabacha (aka Gringolandia, aka El Otro Lado...etc), fancypants lettuces, Asian species of mustardy thing s (tatsoi, mizuna, bok choy, etc), ten or so eggplants, and marigolds. All of this growing in gutted, white-painted waterbottles lying on their sides. The infrastructure consists of 5 wooden trays (1m x .5m) that have been there since Marcos moved in 8 months ago. The plan is to build them up into containers; I'm thinking maybe 18 inches deep (though I'd only fill them to 15 inches-- that should be deep enough for tomatoes, right?). They're pole tomatoes, so I'm hoping to take advantage of the cage situation. The Armenian cukes I plan to swipe from Alfredo (whose roof garden will be the subject of a later post, once I have a digital camera, (which shall be a gradumation present extraordinaire!) can climb up strings I plan to tie to the top of the cage (because I'm going to have to put them on the walled-in side of the cage). The green stuff will have to go in the shadier part of the cage. But since the planters are pretty big, I think it should all go swimmingly. The issue here is cost, of course: the construction of these planters is going to run me from 140 to 280 pesos a piece. (A short one for lettuce, flowers and mustard)... That means about 90 bucks total. Then there's the issue of filling them with soil. At Home Depot (yes, capitalist bullshit palace, but the only nearby resource for such things) a gunnysack of soil runs about 13 bucks (145 pesos). In Tlanepantla, close to Alfredo's house (and about an hour and a half from here without traffic: bus to metro line 2 or 7, transferring to line 9) costs about 2 and a half bucks (30 pesos) piece. Slightly coarser texture, and farther away. I can only carry about one sack at a time, and it's tiring as hell, because they're really heavy. The bus costs about 10 pesos, the metro 3. So that brings the total per-sack cost of soil to 56 pesos, plus a lot of trouble. But considering that's less than half of the cost buying from HD (CBP), and I'll need about two sacks per planterbox, that will make a big difference. So let's see, say I build 4 boxes, one short, three tall: 920ish pesos plus (56 x 8) = 1,368, or about a hundred and ten ish bucks. That's a bit less than what I make per week. But at Hacienda Mixiuhca, we know that these things can be overcome.

Okay, in these harsh times, waste is unacceptable, especially on fabulous haciendas like mine. I have also swiped some worms from the worm crate we rigged up at Alf's place as well. They are currently writhing around in a yogurt tub in my bedroom with some seriously befungused papaya skin. I have a collection of frozen worm food in my fridge for when their population becomes ready for it. I'm trying to decide whether it's better to get a sealable plastic bin from the Home Depot nearby (a semi expensive and cop-outty option) or try to use the wooden crate I picked up off the street, which would have to live on the roof instead of in the kitchen for smellular reasons, is less easily sealed, more complicated, but cheaper and with more street cred. Any thoughts, opinions, designs and other inputs would be appreciated.

And what is an hacienda without livestock? I broke the news of my fowl conspirations to Marcos about a week ago when his Yucatecan buddy came to visit. We were sitting around drinking wine and suddenly I go: "Hey Marcos, what are your feelings about ducks?" And of course he gave me his drunken "what" face and I said, "You know, as animals. What do you think of them?" And of course his response is, "I don't know, I guess they're okay. Why?" So I had to tell him that I was going to buy a couple of ducklings, and asked if it would bother him if I kept them in the clothes cage. "Uh... sure. Why?" "Marcos," I told him in all seriousness, "The best pets are comestible pets." And he considered this for a moment, probably wondering what the nicest way to call me a sick bastard might be, before saying, "That sounds okay. Do you know how to cook duck?" And, okay, the answer is not really, but I mean, this is the age of the Internet. How hard could it be? Furthermore, I have a book of fowl-and-lagomorph rearing instructions from the British Ministry of Let's Not Starve written during the second world war, which is awesome because it's how to grow aminals on the most limited resources possible.

So the plan is to go the market La Merced on Sunday or Monday, pick up some little fuzzies and see what happens.

Viva La Hacienda Mixiuhca!