Summer 2008

Some of the vegetables out of the garden, Spinach, marrows or courgettes as they are called in Holland, even the last of the kale, boere kool in Dutch.
Thulani is picking the figs, Thulani is now in High school, when he was still at this school he used to come and help to get the weeds out during break time.
This holiday he came and helped to clear out the last of the grass and weeds at the bottom of the garden.

Summer 2008

A few of our last photos, to show you how green the garden looks after all the rain this month.

We found a giant marrow, it was as big as a watermelon.
The school was closed already, one of the mothers took it home.
Today we reached the end of the field, next year we could be planting the whole field.
We will need lots of topsoil and compost.
Our wish list for the coming year: shade cloth, wall, compost, topsoil, potting soil, lots of seeds.
more tools , irrigation extension.

Summer 2008

In November we harvested the first summer vegetables, we had many many courgettes, luckily most of them we could harvest before the school closed in December and the feeding stopped till the beginning of January.There are still many butternuts, spinach, beans and brinjals waiting for the school to start again. Many of the mothers who volunteer on the project go home to their families in the rural areas over the holidays, but fortunate for us there are always a few who stay home and keep helping us through the holidays in the vegetable garden, their is always lots of work to do during this time, watering, weeding preparing new beds, new seeds to be planted etc.

When Shirley heard that Gertrude was using some old spectacles from somebody else, she took her to the optician and made sure Gertrude got some new glasses with the right prescription for her eyes.
She is showing them off on the photo standing next to Shirley.

In November Sibongeli got her little baby daughter Gracious Joy, here she is with her big brother Prince. Many of our visitors and early helpers in the garden will remember Sibongeli, she was one of our first volunteers in the project, last year she got a job and left the project, but little Prince is always there to help us in the garden.

Shirley an I would like to thank all our friends especially Henny and Knud Jensen, Marleen Buscop and my mother Marianne Robijn in Holland for all their input, interest and finding of sponsors for The feeding and gardening project, without you the garden could not excist.

A big thank you, we wish you all a healthy new year filled with love and happiness.

Bosbes Kapel

http://www.bosbeskapel.nl/xhtml/zwo.html
My mother in the Netherlands heard that her church was looking for a project they could sponsor in 2008/2009 , she submitted The Riversand feeding and gardening project and we were the lucky ones to be chosen .
I sent them many photos of the project and in September they started off with the sale of postal stamps with pictures of the children of Riversand school enjoying their food.

By Christmas 1000 stamps had been sold, so the children of Riversand school are traveling on the Christmas cards through Holland this year.

Thank you to Gert-Jan de Raad and all the people involved for all your work to make this project a success.

Gertrude's Birthday

Gertrude is our oldest volunteer at the feeding project, we celebrated her 75th also in September with cake and dancing.

Spring time

Spring time is one of the busiest time in the Vegetable garden.
Truckloads of topsoil and compost were carried to
the garden, everyone was topping up the beds, new seeds went in.
Then the watering started, it is still one of our biggest challenges, the water, especially when the seeds has just gone in, the beds have to be watered by hand for the first few weeks and of course we need to have water!!
Many days the tank is empty or the pump does not work or some body at the school switched off the pump, or there is no electricity and then of course nothing works.
The rain only starts in November at the earliest if we are lucky.

Winter months

Tomorrow is the last day of July, almost the end of winter, in August we can start to put the first summer seeds in, lots of bush beans, courgettes, brinjals, peppers etc

The winter was not too bad, we were lucky with the borehole pump, it worked most of the time, the bottle irrigation is still working very well, we also added a new terrace this winter, we are going to try a new method with this terrace, the no till method.
We put lots of new top soil on top , followed with chicken litter and compost, a few weeks ago we planted some new Chinese cabbage there and it is coming up beautifully.

This last monday we had some visitors from KLM again, Suzanne Jansen and William Gebbink.It was nice to have them and to show them what we are doing here, with feeding the children and to show them how the vegetable garden has grown these last years.
They helped with the handing out of the food and getting the last bit of cabbage and turnips out of the ground and putting some new bottles in new beds.
Thank you both, it was fun to have you here.

winter vegetables

We have planted many winter vegetables 2 months ago they are growing beautiful, here is a big bed with Chinese cabbage, a very healthy vegetable and easy to grow, we also have a few beds with Kale and Spinach, together with these we planted lots of Turnip and Beetroot.
At the moment the garden looks really great, the ladies have now all there own beds and love looking after them, they work so hard.

Next week there will arrive truckloads of topsoil and compost, It can only be delivered out side the school gates, so all the soil has to be carried in side to the vegetable garden by the ladies, that is next weeks job.
The following week we will start the next terrace all this soil and compost is for this terrace, we will try a new way of making beds, The No Till Way.
Shirley and I went to a workshop of Bill Kerr a few weeks ago, he is awell known vegetable breeder here in SA, he teached us this new way he has been using for the last years and what gives fantastic results.
It will suit us very well because the digging of the beds takes a long time and is very hard work.
Basically you dont till the soil at all, every thing what grows in the soil stays in, we put manure on top top soil and compost and some lime and we put the seeds in, when the veggies are up and finished the roots can stay in the leaves and anything else stay on the soil and we start all over again.
It sounds almost too good to be true , but we will try it out with terrace no six.

This week we put in the seeds for cabbage , Kale, I thought let try that this winter and it looked a lot like a vegetable, some body gave us and we try to keep going because the mothers like it so much, they called it Zimbabwe cabbage.
So when I bought the packet with seeds I thought great we can have lots now. Then I found out(everyone in Holland ) that it is boerekool, so you see that is how much I know about growing vegetables!!!
But this winter the children at the school will have Hollandse boerekool.
It is also called "Chou Moellier"sounds a lot more interesting then Boerekool.
It is ideal because you dont use the whole plant you just keep picking the leaves off and it will keep growing, I love vegetables like that , Swiss Chard the spinach here is also like that, you just keep on eating from it.
I have learnt so much these last few years about growing vegetables, I hope I can do more companion planting this year and try to plant different vegetables together at the same time so that when the one lot of veggies is finished, the next lot will be ready to be picked.
I want to try not to have any empty bed this year. Hope I will get it right.
If anyone out there has some advice please sent it to me , believe me I can use it.

HERBS

We have a small hedge of an indigenous plant which bears small clusters of round black berries. A visitor to the school garden pointed these berries out to Shirley last year on a small plant which had grown wild, and said how tasty they were. Shirley was hooked! She remembers a friend’s mother making a delicious jam from the berries many years ago but had never before seen them growing in the wild. The berries were left to seed and the resulting hedge now has a lovely crop of fruit which Maaike and Shirley like to eat (the fruit has a liquorice taste), but Milly says ‘it’s an acquired taste’… so not to everyone’s liking then! I was looking up ‘ringworm’ in Margaret Roberts’ “Indigenous healing plants” because so many of the children have ringworm and I hoped we had some plants in the herb garden with which we could treat it. The first plant mentioned is Solanum Nigrum or Nastergal and this is the name of this berry bush!! Apparently the green berries are poisonous (the ripe fruit is not toxic) and it is these green berries that are used to make a paste. This is then frequently applied to the affected area. The leaf of the Solanum Nigrum can also be cooked with spinach – the leaves and the fruit contain fairly high quantities of vitamin C.

We are trying to encourage the women who work in the garden to make use of the herbs to treat ailments. In January, Margaret used some Wilde Als to treat the after effects of a viral infection and was very pleased with the resulting well being. It was also Margaret who applied a whole clove (the spice) to a sore, loose tooth. The pain disappeared she said, and she forgot about her tooth when she was eating her lunch. To her great joy, the tooth came out when she was chewing! She was delighted that she didn’t have to pay a dentist to extract the tooth for her.

by Shirley Doyle

The start of this year did not go too well, really I am never happy there is too much water or there is nothing. We had lots of rain this summer, very good of course, but when it rains it rains with buckets, lots and lots of buckets.
When it is not raining it is dry dry dry. and then we have the biggest problem, the school has only water from the borehole and the pump of the borehole is really the problem of our frustration these last few months. If the pump does not work properly we dont have water or very little water and then that water has to go to the kids in the school first ofcourse in this heat they need to drink water , I wont even start on the situation in the bathrooms of the school when this happens.
At the moment it is a bit better and we started to put the new seeds in, I had to wait till we knew for sure we would have at least the first week enough water for the new seeds to take.

This summer we really wanted to try if we could grow as many pumpkins as we could, last year the ones we planted did very well, so we thought let fill the lower half of the garden with pumpkins, I could not wait to see them grow, but no this year did not go well, perhaps because it was such a wet summer but we only had a few pumpkins this time.
The butternut did better we had planted 2 terraces full of them , they did very very well, also the courgettes or marrows as they call them here, we had lots and lots of them.
But I was really disappointed that the pumpkins did not do so well this summer, whoever is out there and can give me some advise how we can do better next summer please let me know!!!!

A few photos of Christmas party we had for all the ladies, who help in the kitchen and in the vegetable garden.
This way we are saying thank you to all these ladies without whom we would not be able to feed the children or have a vegetable garden.
These mothers are there every morning at 6am winter or summer and believe me 6am winter time is coooold!
They are all volunteers helping us to give their and all the other children at the school a warm meal.
They work hard and have learnt so much!

Buster

BUSTER

Buster must be almost a year old now - he has become the ‘kitchen dog’. Whenever one of us arrives at that side of the school, Buster is sure to make his appearance. He is a big dog and unfortunately leaps up at us in greeting, and then nips your bum and feet! After the initial exuberance, he does quieten down thank goodness. He has such a friendly, sociable nature that you can’t help liking him.

By Shirley Doyle