Indigenous Herbs

Now that spring is here, we have begun putting in more herbs. Unfortunately most of the indigenous herbs that Thoko brought for the garden have died; possible because Johannesburg experiences colder winters than the areas where the plants occur in the wild.

We have put in two new indigenous medicinal herbs:

“Artemesia afra” is one of the oldest and best known of all the indigenous medicines and it is used for a number of ailments. When the mothers who work in the garden saw the plant, they all exclaimed over it, because they know it so well. We’re hoping that once this ‘wilde als’ has grown well, the women will feel free to use it to treat their families.

“Sutherlandia frutescens” or ‘cancer bush’. This is attractive bush with red flowers (July – Dec) and balloon-like seeds. It is also a multi purpose and useful indigenous medicinal plant.

The mothers often show interest about the plants we use as herbs, so we have put three files of information in one of the sheds. These they can use as and when the need arises. When the lemon balm, lemon verbena and lemon grass have grown more, we can introduce the mothers to the delights of herbal teas – beneficial to health and cost effective!

Shirley Doyle

The mothers who volunteer at the project.

All the mothers who volunteer in the project start at 6am, making breakfast for the children, who come to the school early and dont get any breakfast at home, after that they start preparing the meal for all the 750 children, they eat around 10 am at first break, when everyone has eaten, the plates and pots washed the mothers get their food and relax till it is time to start preparing all the vegetables for the next day.
We are feeding the children now 3 days/week, Monday,Tuesday and Wednesday, on Thursday all the mothers work in the garden from early in the morning till around noon , when it gets too hot.
On Thursday we give all the mothers a bag with second hand clothes for all their hard work.
We always need lots of second hand clothes to be able to do this, these ladies work very hard at this project, we could never keep the feeding kitchen and the garden going without all their help.

So thank you ladies for all your hard work to make this possible.

Spring time

I cant believe how fast time goes now a days, already October.
All the hard work has started in the vegetable garden, lots of summer seeds have gone in, we want to try to use the whole of the garden this summer.
Only half of the garden is now terraced and have beds for the plants, the other half is still wild and full of grass and weeds, we have put many old car tyres in this part and will grow the fruit baring plants in the tyres, we tried a few tyres last summer and it went well with the pumpkins and watermelons.
There must be about 70-80 tyres now and every few weeks we will plant a few more seeds in the tyres, hopefully we will have plenty of pumpkins, butternuts, marrows, watermelons and melons this summer season long.

All the mothers worked very hard these last months, we made new compost heaps, all the old tyres moved to the lower part of the garden for the use of the fruit bearing plants this summer and we built the new heaps with the pellets from the Lovell Industries.
We ordered lots of new compost and ofcourse are also making our own.

A statue for our vegetable garden.

Marleen Buscop, my friend in Holland who puts a lot of her time and effort into finding sponsors for our vegetable garden, made this beautiful statue for our project. It was sold for 250 Euros , what wil go towards the vegetable garden.

Thank you Marleen not only for this statue but also for your ongoing work to find new sponsors and tell people in Holland about our project here.

A Big Thank You to all our volunteers.

A big thank you to all our ladies , with out their hard work our vegetable garden would still be a bare dry piece of land full of weeds,
THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR HARD WORK. !!



Our soil is full of stones, the ladies dig the beds with piks and spades and sift the sand so that all the stones will be out of the soil, it is hard work especially in the winter when the ground is hard and dry, this winter they digged all the beds in the 2 new terraces.

Is there anybody who can give me advise how to tackle the problem of overflowing water tanks, is there a way to stop the pump when the water tank is full?????

We "pay" our ladies with secondhand clothes, if there is anybody who wants to donate clothes for our ladies please contact me.

Thank you to our sponsors and helpers.

Thank you Grant for putting in the irrigation in our new terraces and thanks to Nic and Aidon , Mabel and Sigizele for building the new compost heaps with the pellets from Lovell Industries, thank so much Allison it looks so much neater with the pellets.

This month we received the money from the Protestante Kerk in Leidschendam in Holland, they collected this during the Easter period. Thank you so much, this will make it possible for us to plant the whole garden this summer, we can put in many truckloads of compost, what our soil desperately needs, it will pay for all our summer seeds, we need new garden tools, spades, forks, hand tools etc.
Thank you all !!!!! You all helped to feed 750 children for this year.

It is already 2 months ago that we let you know what is happening at Riversands.

In May we had a problem with the pump of the borehole at the school,( we dont have municipal water here only one borehole) the pump broke and then ofcourse there is no water, can you imagine 750 children in the school and there is no water, just think only of how the toilets would look like!!!!!!!

The Village church in Lonehill , donated the money for repairing the pump, luckily a few days later that problem was solved.

In the garden the terraces 4 and 5 have been built and all the beds are almost digged, this last weekend the irrigation was put in, this month we have to get all the beds ready for the summer seeds to go in .

We also sorted out our compost heaps, Lovell Industries donated lots of pellets to built around our compost heaps , it looks a lot neater and is easier to control. Thanks Allison.

I am looking for some body who knows about water tanks, our tanks are connected to the borehole, but I have a problem that when the tank is full, it still keeps pumping water up and ofcourse the tanks overflow, a lot of waste of water but it also damages the brick work around the tanks. As far as I know we need something like a floater in the tank that will warn the pump when the tank is full and then stops pumping. It would be great if there was any body out there who could give me some advice on this!!

New walls for terraces 4 en 5

This month we could start with the building of the walls for terraces 4 and 5,we hope they will be finished by the end of April, then in May we can put the seeds in for our winter crop.

This month we had a really nice surprise from the Protestante Church in Leidschendam in Holland, they had held a fasting collection for our Vegetable Garden during the 40 days to Easter.

Their gift of 2500 Euro will help us with building a wall for a new terrace 6 , we will be able to put the irrigation in the new terraces 4,5 and 6 and I hope we will have enough to be able to make a better housing for our compost heaps.

Thank you all so much for your generosity!

We also like to thank Jenny Page and her students from Redhill school for their help in the garden and with the feeding this month.

Your help and interesse in our project is very much appreciated.

The Herb Garden

One of the project ideas was to get the children involved in the vegetable garden. Unfortunately this is not very practical – school hours are precious and should be used to cover the school syllabus. A bus collects the children from their homes and drops them off just before school starts. Again at the end of the school day, the children leave by bus. So no time for gardening!

We thought perhaps the teachers might be able to use the garden in their lesson plans, and we hope to explore this idea during 2007.

Another idea evolved concerning indigenous plants. It seems almost 70% of the children have a Zulu background, and we discovered that one of the mothers, Thoko, (she helps in the kitchen and in the garden), is a sangoma. (A sangoma is a practitioner of herbal medicine, divination and counselling in traditional Nguni (Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele and Swazi) societies of Southern Africa -en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sangoma).

At the beginning of 2007, Thoko brought back some plants from her home in Kwazulu Natal, and has planted these in a small area on the first terrace. We hope that with the assistance of the teachers as part of a lesson, she will instruct and educate the children about the medicinal use of these plants according to the Zulu culture.

Visit Martinair Technicians

On Monday the 22 nd of January we got a lot of help from 9 Technicians of Martinair.
Hans Katoen from KLM' s Wings of Support had organised a working trip to Johannesburg for the technicians, we were very lucky to have some help with the ceiling in the safe house of CLM in Diepsloot and with the feeding of all the children in Riversands Primary school and digging a few beds in the vegetable garden.
Thank you all so much.
I am every time again surprised about the kindness of people, even from so far away, to come and help and work hard in a place and for people they dont even know! and for free ofcourse.

2007 starts with great news!

At the start of this new year we heard that the money from ST.ABCD has arrived.
St.ABCD is a Dutch organisation who looks for sponsors for projects of Dutch people in third world countries. My friend Marleen Buscop in Holland had applied for the vegetable garden to be put on their list, we send in a letter about what we are doing here and yes we were accepted, the rest of the work was done in Holland by Marleen, thank you so much Marleen thanks to you we can start soon with building our next wall for terrace 4 and put the irrigation in there as well.

We would also like to thank all the ladies of the Soroptimistclub Leiden-Aurora for donating to our garden, thank you so much for your generosity.

Heel veel dank aan alle vrienden en familie van Marleen en myzelf die hebben bijgedragen aan het geweldige bedrag dat we van St. ABCD ontvingen aan het begin van dit nieuwe jaar.