Making compost tea

A few years ago, the concept of earthworm farms took hold here in the valley. They consist of layers of 'sieves' with earthworms in them, to which you add your kitchen scraps and the earthworms transform them into a tea of earthworm poop which you can then distribute around the garden. The drawback of this system is that it can be rather easily dismantled by a baboon, who is after the vegetables inside.

My neighbour went away on holiday and I went to water her garden one afternoon to find that the worm farm had been tipped over and the back yard was literally covered in thousands of wriggling, transparent earthworms, possibly the only thing in the world that I find totally repulsive. Using all kinds of implements, from cabbage leaves to newspaper, I gingerly scooped up the worms who were wriggling in all directions in the hope of finding their way back underground into real soil and returned them to their duties in their plastic palace. I placed a paving slab on top to deter any more baboon raids, not that it would have stopped them, but I really was not going to get involved with earthworms again. Fortunately she returned the next day and did a proper job of securing the contraption with large rubber bands.

For those, like me, who wanted an easy way of making compost without an open heap, there is the alternative of a special bucket with a tap, into which you put all your scraps, including bones, leftover meat, dairy products and paper, believe it or not, and then sprinkle compost accelerator on top, then put on the lid. You add more every day and press it down with a paper plate and after a week or two you will get a compost 'tea' when you turn the tap at the bottom. After about 6 weeks it will stop yielding tea and you can then tip the remains into the compost heap at the bottom of the garden, where it will very soon turn into the most amazing black soil. The tea is mixed 1:100 and poured over the garden plants, which thrive on this pure juice. The most amazing thing is that although the organisms which break down the matter are alive, you will never see any mould or maggots in the bucket. I have recently opened two which were filled more than a year ago and then left in a corner.  Here they are:

What you see in the buckets are the eggshells, some squash skins which do not degrade easily being of the calabash family, and a few layers of newspaper. The buckets were filled to the top and everything has degraded into moisture, leaving the shells and skins as fresh as the day they were put in. There was no smell whatsoever. It really is the perfect way of recycling organic matter, particularly for flat dwellers, as it can be kept in your kitchen with no ill effects.

And that's my punt for compost tea and organic gardening! Oh, and although my lawn looks somewhat dead in the picture, it's actually quite green at the moment!

What lurks in yonder ivy?

My friend, Mark, lives in a small cottage surrounded by ancient milkwoods, which provide shelter from the winds and refuge for francolins and guineafowl from night time predation by wild cats which live on the mountains above us. He has no walls or fences around the property and snakes pass through from time to time. One hot summer's day, he noticed a movement near his garage, which is covered by decades-old ivy that extends about 40cm from the wall. He went outside to look and saw a large puffadder making its way up into the ivy, no doubt to find a nice spot for a snooze! Being the man he is, he just shrugged and left it to coexist in his space.

It was years before he told me about it, and at least once a week I would duck under the ivy to get past the car when I went there for tea and a chat about what fish he had been catching and what the latest skinder (gossip) was on the ledge down at Rooikrantz in Cape Point Nature Reserve where die-hard fishermen went to catch yellowtail. I'm sure I would have steered clear if I'd known about the puffadder sooner, but so long had passed since he saw it go up the ivy that I figured it would be long gone.

Last week, he needed to fix a few leaks in the garage roof and sent the gardener up the ladder to do so. The gardener needed to cut back a little of the ivy to access the sheeting, and the leaks were duly plugged. A couple of days later, a fierce southeaster blew across the Peninsula, wreaking havoc in the gardens, and apparently a crucial anchor point in the ivy had been severed, as the entire creeper peeled away from the wall and fell to the ground, looking for all the world like a rolled up carpet, so tightly interwoven were the stalks!

A long-hidden window saw the light of day, and fortunately no snakes were found on the scene of the horticultural disaster. But it took the gardener a whole day to chop it into neat squares and two trips to the dump to dispose of it!

Another muttering

I had so many good ideas for blogs today, but unfortunately they all came to me while I was driving! These thoughts dissipate as fast as they arrive and it is impractical to try and pull off the road every ten minutes to write down a note. It has been suggested that I get a basic voice recorder so that I can just say a few words immediately to remind me later of my train of thought, and that is definitely the way to go. So many pearls of wisdom lost in the hum of tyres on tarmac! My phone has a voice recorder, but by the time I accessed it, scrolling up and down from screen to screen, I would be in a ditch somewhere and liable for prosecution for using my phone while driving, in the unlikely event of a traffic cop ever being where he needs to be. Which brings to mind...

As I drew up to a stop street today, I was unable to pull into the road as a woman was wandering across the road with a small child, in a roughly diagonal manner. She was talking on her phone and was apparently completely unaware that she was crossing a road! She was so engrossed in her conversation that she looked neither left nor right, didn't hold the child's hand, and was in fact wandering aimlessly in the general direction of the other side of the road. She did not acknowledge me as I pulled out of the stop street and drove behind her and her child who still had not quite made it to the pavement, and I was hard pressed not to blare the horn to give her such a fright that she would drop her phone down the storm drain. I doubt that she realised she was endangering her child's life. If one of our lunatic taxi drivers had been in the vicinity, they would have become another statistic in our inauspicious road accident records. It appears that it should also be illegal to talk on your phone while walking in the street. Apparently not all women can multitask.

The complete idiocy that we see on our roads these days makes me truly wonder whether the conspiracy theorists are not absolutely spot on when they tell us that we have been transformed into a race of robotic morons! She certainly fits the bill.

Fish Hoek bay

The sea around the Peninsula is strangely calm today, with barely a shore break from Muizenberg to Cape Town. It reminds me of the Mediterranean at Marbella, where the sea sort of folds over onto the beach, and the colour of the water at Fish Hoek this evening was a crystal turquoise. Any sharks cruising by would have been clearly visible, but as usual, none were in sight when I was perfectly positioned to spot them!

A school of dolphins has been very active in the bay all week and those living on the hillside above the beach have been treated to close-up displays as they frolicked along the shoreline before heading back out into the middle of False Bay to feed.

The lifesaving club were out in full force on their paddleskis, taking advantage of the perfect conditions to carry out what looked like timed races out to a buoy and back to the beach. Two paddleskiers remained out to sea and a rubber duck patrolled a little further out, as the shark spotters had departed for the day and it is better to be safe than sorry.

I'm afraid to say that, no matter how inviting the water looks, I have never really gone back into the water since Jaws, and having seen photos of what lurks in the breakers at Fish Hoek, it seems that it is probably a wise choice. Perhaps when the proposed and approved shark net is eventually installed, I may become brave again and take to the waves as I used to as a girl.

It's hard to believe, but we used to swim at night at Fish Hoek!

Sinister and dexter

Went walking with the BungyPump sticks again today. I have to give a report soon, but 2 weeks is not long enough to test their efficacy. Although I can feel I am having a good workout using the hydraulic ski-pole type walking sticks, it is an unfamiliar way of walking and I need to become more accustomed to moving the poles in sync with my feet. I have always had a problem co-ordinating leg and arm movements and aerobics and formal dancing just don't work for me.

Being left-handed when I write or paint, and right-handed for everything else is something I only began to think about recently. I always assumed I was left-handed but now realise that I am actually predominantly right-handed, but have certain problems associated with left-handedness. I have difficulty in defining left and right directions; an instruction such as "turn right at the robot" doesn't register at all and I have to consciously think about which way to turn. If I need to find a place, the way to remember it is not turn left and then left again and then third right. That goes straight out of my head. I must have street names. That is because I am predominantly visual and can usually only remember something I have seen, and not heard. If I am going to an area I am unfamiliar with, I need to look at a street map and put that information into my memory before I set out.

I can tell you where I have seen a word on a page, but I can't tell you your name if I've just been introduced to you. I drift off into another world in lectures if there's nothing visual to anchor my attention, and my peripheral vision is far better than looking directly at an object. When someone talks to me I am constantly scanning the background to see what's going on - probably would make a good bodyguard, checking for snipers - although the person talking to me doubtless feels I am not quite focussed on what they are saying! In movies, I am more interested in the scene behind the actors and the first thing I noticed in Notting Hill was a postcard of the V&A Waterfront and Table Mountain pinned to the staircase behind Hugh Grant's head! I also look at every picture on the walls to see if I've seen it before.

The really good thing about this duality is, I suppose, that if I have a stroke I will still be able to talk, as I use both sides of the brain at the same time!

From blogger to slogger

My little potter in the garden turned out to be more of a slog. I have advanced from blogger to slogger!

What started out as a minor remodelling of a flowerbed turned into a landscaping exercise of major proportions. He Who Can Fix Anything temporarily abandoned his removal of the engine from the car to ensure that I did a proper job, as always. I can be sure that whatever small job I attempt, he will turn it into at least 3 hours' work, involving hard labour and broken nails. This time I got wise to that, and immediately got the nail clippers out to do a quick manicure rather than end up with a snap-off. Then it was on with the gardening gloves and pulling out the old plants that had got straggly and moth-eaten and were nothing more than a trap for dead leaves blowing in the wind.

HWCFA then proceeded to dig all of the soil out of the flower bed, which is just a narrow strip of soil along a wall, bordered by brick paving. I had intended to remove the bricks along the edge but discovered, after 30 years (doesn't time fly!) that they were actually cemented in place and it was best to let sleeping dogs lie. The soil only went down a foot before turning into concrete. At least we know we have a foundation. Then we sieved the entire pile of soil, discarding years of broken mussel shells, odd stones and ancient roots. The pile of pure soil left behind was a joy to behold and he decided he would paint the wall before we filled it in again. I took the opportunity to take the gap and leapt into the car under the pretext of needing to get fertilizer and punnets of annuals at the nursery, and left him to it!

It took five minutes to get the plants and I then spent a leisurely half hour enjoying a cappuccino and chat up at the local coffee shop. Once I had given the paint long enough to dry, it was back home to continue the job. Twelve pretty little dianthus are now adorning the revamped flowerbed and I have to say it was well worth all the effort. It has certainly transformed that area of the garden.

Once that was done and the customary braai was had for lunch, I headed for the front garden, where I proceeded to pull out most of a huge tangle of vygie (don't know English name!) that had expanded over the years and looked rather tired, together with a massive arctotis which had borne 1 flower over the last 25 years. I only kept it for its attractive grey foliage, but I have decided to turn the front garden into an indigenous paradise for birds, to match all the other frontages in our road. I have a long way to go to catch up with the impressive array of aloes, proteas, vygies and other specimens of our magnificent fynbos, but you can be sure that nothing that I plant will have a bulb attached to it, as it will go the way of every other bulb I have ever planted, down the throat of the porcupine.

After the day's slog, I was feeling somewhat crocked, to the extent that I actually decided to have a hot bath! I picked some branches of rosemary and lavender and crushed them under the hot tap, throwing them into the bath after that, and lay in my own herb-scented water, which I am sure did me a lot of good.

At least I know I won't have fleas and my hair will be shiny!

Early morning

The days are drawing in here in Kommetjie. No longer are the mountains across the bay bathed in early sunlight when I wake at 6am. The scent of autumn is all around and the water coming through the pipes to the shower is cooler than it was in midsummer.

After some mountainous seas during the week caused by a forerunner of the winter cold fronts, the sea is like a lake today. On our early morning walk with the dogs, we could see numerous tankers and cargo vessels strung along the horizon, taking advantage of the calm water to round the Cape of Good Hope as quickly as possible. Closer inshore, the skiboats are heading down towards Cape Point, where good catches of healthy snoek are being made every day, bringing cheap food to the tables of the people of the Peninsula. These large predatory fish, weighing up to 5kg, can sometimes go for as little as R15 if too many are caught. The boats go out to sea in any weather when the snoek are running, as no one knows when they will just disappear for a while, cutting off the income of subsistence fishermen. They range up and down the West coast and generally are caught further north in winter.

It's nearly full moon and the rocks down at the lighthouse are fully exposed to the point where they drop off into the sea as a ledge and the kelp forest begins. This is where the best black mussels may be picked off the rocks to take home for steaming on the fire and a quick meal with peri-peri or garlic butter. The mussels grow in such thick beds that some of the shells are deformed as they squeeze each other out to get the best position to feed from the currents. Sometimes the animal inside is small and hardly worth eating, indicating a season of poor nutrition, but at the moment they seem particularly healthy, which is a sign that perhaps all is well at the bottom of the food chain.

I'm off to potter in the garden now, before the day warms up.