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.