Van Stadens

Thursday, 21 April 2011 Did the pipe really go underneath the road, that was the question which needed to be answered today so as soon as we arrived we extended the last hole we dug and found that instead of disappearing underneath the tarmac the pipe made a sharp turn back again.   We felt […]

Friday, 08 April 2011 First plan of action today was to connect the water to the two-inch pipe we discovered at the old nursery and we were very pleased when we arrived at the reserve to see Rob already there. After a brief chat he disappeared to work at digging the pipe in between the

Sunday,03 April 2011 For our monthly meeting we had the pleasure of inviting Adrian Odgers to come and share his vast knowledge of plants with us and, what is usually just a short walk from the conference centre to the rockery and back, we took over an hour to cover this distance hearing interesting information

Friday, 01 April 2011 Popped out to find the leak we discovered a few days ago and see what we needed to fix it. It rained quite a lot yesterday and, combined with the leakage, made for quite muddy soil. We duly asked permission from the ‘madala’ who lives on the plot, he looks a

Wednesday, 30 March 2011 Quite a day of lots of different things, Rob helped us today and at first it was a bit of adjustment for him to fit into the well oiled team. Ellie and I are of course so used to working together that we don’t need to say what needs to be

Friday, 26 March 2011 No blogs from the previous two trips, the first one by Ellie and I to make a path from Gibson’s Gulch to the river crossing, not quite your average garden job but we managed and then another one by Neil to wield his chainsaw to cut the offending pine tree down.

Sunday, 19 March 2011 Last time when we opened the valve we noticed water oozing out of the soil on the road which of course indicated a further leak so we needed to move the main connection to the other side of the road. I had dug a trench there already the previous outing and

Wednesday, 03 March 2011 The mission today was to get the pipe to the manhole at the quarry. We got stuck last time at the pine tree and no matter what we tried we could not get the 32mm pipe through. We still wanted to have something to show for our effort and left the

Saturday, 5 March 2011 Today a big push, pardon the pun, to get the pipe through to the end of the servitude and to get it connected to the old asbestos pipe by the track. Neil had organized all the connections, unfortunately he had made the connection for a 32mm pipe and we had used

Sunday, 27 February 2011 Chip off the old block, so when our son, Nick, was visiting us from Cape Town he wanted to see what we were busy with and he duly got roped in. We had decided that the old asbestos pipe was broken and leaking in too many places to be reliable so