All in a day’s work

Time to get back up to date, quite a few things have happened in the past three weeks.

We said goodbye to the three interns who left last Tuesday, it was touching that they phoned Ellie to thank Fovs for everything we have done and we hope that they will find work after the promised jobs at the municipality did not materialize.

Just to summarize, we still have good rains, sometimes a bit too much of a good thing but the water birds certainly enjoy the full dams.

The log was placed there by Rob who seems to know what a bird likes.

The shade house remodelling continues, we are lowering the water pipes to take the load off the shade cloth using old electrical wire abandoned on top of the mountain.

Still waiting for the soil, both potting soil and levelling soil so we fetched some ourselves with the trailer to keep us going.

The paths and beds in the arboretum got rather overgrown, even with the brush cutter it was quite a job to make it user friendly again. There are still plenty of opportunities to pretty it up further but alas there is only so much we can do.

We are making very good progress filling up the empty spaces left by the plant sale, lots of propagation, potting and bagging going on. We much appreciate the contributions by various people of seedlings, plants and cuttings such as these Bulbines from Dee and Strelizia regina from Mark. Ellie has collected lots of cones from Leucadendrons producing more than 1000 seeds, lots of potential plants!

Conditions for hacking are rather trying, it either rains or is unbearably hot. Still Rob, Cathy and Keith persevere in a very difficult patch near the Van Stadens bridge. In a way it was quite amusing when they were seen by the surveillance camera and the police came to talk them out of jumping!

We have put some of the funds generated by the sale to good use by extending the irrigation in the greenhouse, buying a step ladder, petrol and oil, pots and bags and various odds and ends to keep us going.

Flora and fauna is doing very well at the moment as is shown by this watersnake having a snooze in the braai area and this very floriferous Pelargonium cucullatum in the entrance circle.

On inspection of our water pipe we found that our new neighbour has ringbarked the blue gums along the stream. Very encouraging to see.

With all this work going on we do not forget the botanical side of our mission, it was great to get a visit by Tony Dold after we reported the location of the Pelargonium elegans in the reserve. He was of the opinion though that we needed our heads checked for working in 36 degree heat

To finish off, we are approaching 250 members on our Facebook page so obviously there is plenty of interest out there but there is very little interaction with them, how can we change that?