The alarm went off rather early to be at Van Stadens in time to do all the usual things such as putting the tables out, banners up, organizing stalls etc. First off were the runners, there were about 120 of them and the comments afterwards were very positive. Perhaps the ideal weather after a week […]

Tomorrow is the big day and now is the time for the cut flowers. We went to the mountain to collect some P. cynaroides but the flowering season is late this year and there was also some evidence that illegal picking has taken place. We still managed to get a nice variety of of Leucodendrons

2016.10.01 Our monthly meeting was totally focused on the preparation for the Open Day and thanks to the excellent turnout and everybody pitching in by teatime all plants were sorted, dots were painted, name signs put in their places etc. For a while we have been concerned about plants disappearing so as a deterrent we

A subject you’ll see many times until the Open Day is done and dusted. The preparations have been going on for a bit and now they have started in earnest by getting stuck in at the nursery with sorting and weeding and spotting. In the meantime we are still bringing in plants from home and

It was tempting to postpone our weekly Wednesday workday to the next day as bergwinds with temperatures of over 36 were forecast but there were too many things to attend to. First of all our weather station had stopped communicating since our last visit on Friday and, believe it or not, it was our kettle

One of the issues for the Friends of Van Stadens is that we get very little feedback about the usefulness of the various things we do at the Reserve, be it laying on a trail, putting up a bench, clearing aliens etc. Therefore it was very good to see on the hiking club’s Facebook page

For a while we have been interested in getting some weedguard rather than plastic for the nursery because the plastic doesn’t last very long so when Neil managed to get some at a very good price we jumped at at. Slight hitch, we had to collect it straight away and off we went with the

Never a dull moment, this time it was a geocaching event organized by Wikkelgat, I love the names these funny people give themselves. As part of the worldwide Geocaching day they had hidden a few new caches but the main reason was to socialise and have a braai and what better way to socialize than

The other exciting activities lately such as bird hide, water pipe and nursery have taken the focus a bit away from the arboretum so today we spent some time there. Thankfully Jenny is making sure that the new trees do not lack water but to keep on top of the undesirables coming up after the

As mentioned previously Rob discovered a leak in our water supply a few weeks ago but as the water was still running and there were tons of other things to do I tried to ignore it. However when we inspected it last weekend it was obvious that it had been running for quite a while.