Van Stadens gardening 2012.02.05

Saturday, February 4,2012

Our first meeting of the year for the Friends of Van Stadens. It rained more than 100mm over the past few days and it showed by the poor turnout, only the diehards, Jenny, Ellie, Merike, Marc, Neil, Seato, Wesley and ourselves pitched. In spite of that or maybe because a smaller group can work more efficiently we got a heck of a lot done.

For a long time the untidy and overgrown traffic circle by the entrance has been a thorn in our eyes and we decided to do something about it.

Dwarfed by the giant Strelitzia it was still no match for our newly acquired chainsaw. We only cut of a few overhanging branches and cleaned off all the dead leaves while the ladies uncovered the totally overgrown flower beds and planted lots of new plants and bulbs such as Clivia, Agapenthus, Veltheima and many more.

We even met a resident frog

We left a huge mound of cuttings, branches, weeds etc. Hopefully the Reserve’s staff will clean that up during the week and get that compost heap going again.

At lunchtime everybody left and we returned the tools to our “office”. On the way back we spotted a lovely hamerkop making the most of the wet conditions.

Lunch was had on Pienaar’s bankie and on our way out we still made a turn at the old nursery, swept out the old rondavel, admired the multitude of wasp nests in the old potting shed and one of the tortoises which was recently released but mostly admired the lovely proteas in the overcast conditions.

On the way home we stopped at the sawmill to see if we could get some compost and, even though the owner muttered about not being open on Saturday he let us fill our trailer for free so we made good use of his generosity.