Abundance!

We celebrate our abundance: with over 100mm of rain in the past few weeks, our new dam is the fullest it’s ever been. At 16,000 litres, we have more fresh water than we’ve ever had since moving to Knysna (almost 3 years ago) and with 14 solar panels we also have more domestic electricity since leaving the buzzing city life behind. So we were able to watch all Bafana’s games (except the disgraceful one when our DSTV gratefully did not want to work) and we were able to shower afterwards!

This abundance did not come without the necessary animal sacrifice however: I found our hounds chewing on a headless animal which I at first thought was a lamb, but which we now believe to be a newborn/miscarried calf. The fact that it had no head has led us to assume that it had initially been caught by a leopard (or maybe used for muti?)…life in wildest Africa…


Father’s day saw Kevin taking the kids on canoe rides on the dam and we collected our latest farm volunteer, Rob (from the US) the following day. A belated and ongoing father’s day present: someone to wash dishes, deal with compost, dig trenches, cut trees, build Lego, etc. Every man needs a wife and a “wwoofer”!

I’ve been collecting refuse bags of shredded paper from the office which we plan to use for isolation in the walls of our (still to be constructed) “wwoofing” bedroom. One of my colleagues assumed that it was for a dog house - not knowing that WWOOF is: Willing Workers on Organic Farms!

On the garden front – we have had some devastation caused by the cows (aptly named Koeitjie no 1 and Koetjie no 2) who managed to break in through the collapsing fence. Not much remains of our vegetables (no tomatoes, no peppers, no spinach, etc.) and many of our flowering plants have also been chowed….luckily Rob jumped in and secured the area.

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I also celebrate the completion of a new slip cover for our much-loved couch. This may not sound like much, but the cover was constructed from the office curtains which at first became dribbled in varnish by an incompetent painter – at which time I had a complete nervous breakdown and wept like a baby (it was shortly after my mother died). Then, the day after moving into our new house, a baboon got into the office and defecated all over the curtains (floors, walls, desks, etc.). We had no water (due to the drought), no bath (we only have a shower) and the laundromat wanted to charge us R600 to wash them – so they were shoved into the container for 6 months, until they were finally transformed.