Van Stadens

The day before

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 […]

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Preparations Take 2

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

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Preparations

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

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Heatwave

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

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Voetsac

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

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On a roll

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

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Geocaching

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

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Arboretum

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

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Windbreak

Wednesday was a truly miserable day weather-wise so we decided to postpone it till today which turned out to be a very good idea. The plan was to secure the other droppers as well and put the shade cloth on for the windbreak. It all worked out quite well and this is the result: I

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