Just an update as the whole story with our water supply has not been conducive to writing. Our workparty last Saturday predictably did not attract a whole bunch of people. We expected that and did not organize much work, in fact the first hour or so was spent just chatting and after that some weeding […]

The story of the leaking pipe continues. After our heroic efforts to seal the leak in the cement pipe in the mud last time we went back last Wednesday to reconnect the join in the pipe. What an impossible job that turned out to be as we could not manage to bring the two ends

Time to catch up as blogging hasn’t exactly been number one priority as far as Van Stadens is concerned, there was little positive to report. Take last Wednesday, we removed the tree that had fallen on the overhead pipeline, in doing so I broke the support wire, managed to fix it, added a lot more

We should have paid closer attention to the weather report, after all it warned us that it would rain today. We first fetched 11 bags of compost again and were delayed by Mr. Vermaak needing a chat. It had rained in PE the two previous days so we decided to weed in the entrance circle

The monthly meeting was on yesterday and a walk to the fort in Longmore Forest was the objective. The weather was quite unpredictable, it turned out quite fresh with a light breeze, ideal for walking. Unfortunately some people didn’t pitch so the cost of the permit that Ellie went to a lot of trouble for

Thanks to the generosity of the people at the municipal nursery we got some surplus river sand from their newly installed misting house so today we removed all the old soil from the misting house and replaced it with the proper sand. Whilst doing so another weak spot in the heating wire broke, it looks

Weedeated fynbos path and more in arboretum, porcupine has munched all Babania bulbs. Ellie cleared all ericas around Dell with help from Goodman, big improvement. After tea Ellie continued with the help of Rob, digging out Dietes was hard work. I reconnected Misting House waterpipe with the main water supply, nobody knows where the water

It seems it always rains on a Wednesday, fortunately most of it fell during the night and it started clearing on the way in. Rob was already there, pottering away in the greenhouse planting some seedlings he has grown at home and we offloaded some of the plants we had brought. The shade house is

Got going early today because we needed to pick up Adrian Odgers. He is giving Jenny some advice on the inclusion of Proteas in the reprint of our tree booklet. As we arrived we just caught Goodman who was on his way to town with most of the staff and also at the same time

Woke up to the sound of rain pelting on the roof and rain forecast for most of the morning. In spite of that we still went on our merry way to a wet and soggy Van Stadens. Whilst Ellie went in to to see if Goodman was there I went for a quick look to