We had our monthly meeting today with the best turnout to date. Our guest speaker. the well known raptor expert Arnold Slabbert must have been an excellent draw card.  He made it very clear to us that treating problem animals such as rodents with rat poison is a very bad practice and he showed us […]

At last the rebuilding of the picnic bench out of the remnants of the old ones was finished in my workshop and, rather than re-assembling it on a Wednesday with all the accompanying distractions, we decided to go out on Saturday and take our time about it. I had marked out all the pieces so

Tony must have been quite frustrated as we found that he had been swinging a sledgehammer with abandon in the old aviary and knocked a layer of bricks off all the internal  walls and even started on one of the very solidly built birdbaths. The result of course was the place strewn with rubble so

On Monday we climbed the Van Stadens mountain by 4×4 (aren’t we energetic) and started the search for the elusive Erica sagittata in the area to the south of the antennae park on top. Even though we saw plenty of interesting Ericas in the area Wesley had indicated a few years ago we did not

The intervening week gave us some time to crystallize some ideas about how best to shape the braai area and make it a little more inviting than just a cleared out rusty old aviary. The idea is to separate the sitting area from the fire and smoke area and, as the site is quite exposed

Various groups visiting the Reserve have expressed the desire to be able to braai in the Reserve and we have been asked to come up with suggestions how the old aviary could be used. The aviary was used a long time ago to rehabilitate poisoned or injured raptors and had turned into a real eyesore

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

2017.07.16 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

2014.07.09 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