Van Stadens

Full program today and on top of that we also had a phone call they would deliver the new benches so instead of our usual first delivery to the nursery we went straight to the arboretum to prepare for the installation of the water pipe. This went well so we were back at the nursery […]

I haven’t blogged the past few times we’ve been to VS because it tends to become repetitive but, as this is a record what we do, I need at least try to keep it up. Our focus has been two-pronged lately, the nursery and the arboretum and both show steady progress. In the nursery you

We were away camping which of course does not mean that work comes to a standstill as our hacking team kept up their sterling work and also inspected the new game fence which has sprung up along the north-east border of the reserve. Many unanswered questions here. We hear rumours that buffalo will be bred

Ellie’s posting to Facebook, I can’t say it any better: A HUGE thank you to the 8 people that came to our monthly meeting! Although all of us were the core group.Though in the arboretum, we got 7 big burned trees taken down and cut into pieces. A lot of alien trees cut and poisoned,

Today can be summarized in one sentence, plumbing, weeding, planting and talking. We hadn’t seen the staff for a while so Ellie needed some catching up with the happenings at the reserve. We were impressed that the new garden at the parking area was nicely weeded, the grass in and around the nursery was impeccably

We’ve had a series of exceptionally hot days lately and, as another one was predicted for Wednesday, we decided it would be better to shift the old fogies day to Tuesday. It still was rather hot and we tried to find shade in the arboretum to try and get some semblance of order in the

The fab four were present today and apart from hacking, composting all trees in the arboretum and extensive work in the nursery nothing of note happened. We saw fleeting glimpses of staff but no work was observed.

For our monthly meeting it was decided rather than doing some much needed work to go out and sniff the flowers on the mountain. It is not easy to think of something which we have not done before and is not too strenuous and I came up with a 1km walk to a small peak

One must be dedicated to go to Van Stadens even on one’s birthday. Of course I planned to take it easy and ‘just quickly’ put a joiner in the pipe where we made a temporary repair before going to Cape Town The exercise was easy enough, take rocks off, cut pipe, let water run out

It could have been lonely out there today as no-one of the usual Wednesday crew turned up except the two stalwarts but thankfully first  Noxolo and Samantha lent a hand in the shade house and later Tony did the same in the Arboretum. What started out as a simple weeding session in the shade house