Van Stadens

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

Too much happened today to make it into a story so I’ll just list them. We collected another ten bags of compost at St Albans, this will do for a while. on the way in we met Rob, Keith and Cathy all ready to attack some aliens while we delivered another 1000 planting bags to

At long last some respite from the drought and high temperatures that we have experienced the last few weeks. It rained throughout the night and it was still raining when we were on our way to the reserve. Fortunately as soon as we arrived it stopped and we could work in relatively cool and overcast

Intended meeting was delayed as usual, Goodman not available and we had to wait for Tony. In the meantime repaired the sprinkler riser which had been damaged by the mower, the staff had dug a hole to expose the pipe and I thought that just screwing in a stopper would do the trick. Unfortunately it

There was lots of unfinished business today on the eve of our departure on a month holiday so we got cracking early. Ellie had denuded our garden (not really) of plants for the entrance circle, mainly Pelargoniums for the Pelargonium patch and some crassula and we managed to plant them before Sheena and Sian O’Keeffe

Really too tired to be blogging but if I don’t it will lose its immediacy so here goes. After the weekend’s hike up Ladyslipper with 17 people it was back to business today. It had rained during the night which made it impossible to start with varnishing the picnic tables so instead we started with