Updates: Buying a nursery, 11 year Moringas, pig, protecting chicks, school gardens

Sorry, this is going to be scattered because it's been so long since I last posted:

Heart & Soil nursery
We really like our area, and our mini-farm. Despite it's challenges, it feels like a good fit for who we are. Like a lot of things that have happened in our lives, our farm feels like it's a gift from God. The drought has been really hard on a lot of places, including nurseries, and one of the nurseries on our street put their land (1 acre) on the market a few months ago. We ended up buying it, including the nursery stock.

We've been thinking for a while about responsible savings. Having kids, it doesn't feel right to us (at least not right now) not to build any retirement savings if it's within our power to save, especially given our relatively tenuous work incomes, the fact we have chosen to be completely uninsured, and the knowledge that although our lifestyle is pretty simple, it still costs some money. The nursery felt like a good middle ground for where we are at: it's not giving away all our savings, but it's also not putting money into huge companies.

We want to keep the plot as a nursery, and keep the people who work/live there employed. Much of the nursery management will continue to be in the hands of an experienced nurseryman, and we'll try hard to support without being overly involved, at least while I have full time non-farm work.

Despite pretty high financial stakes (retirement no longer in U.S. Stocks!), it felt very low stakes-- the logical next step in an adventure that will inevitably have hard parts. Despite feeling this is low-stakes and good-- the hardest thing about taking ownership of this property is still facing up to fears around money. We are trying really hard to fight that idea that we own or deserve our money. Even so, knowing the nursery is not going to make money for a long time quickly brings the focus back to money as we grapple with our responsibilities for paying people. When I am focused on money, it becomes about power, and I wonder if the opposite of coercive, extractive, money-oriented power in this scenario is not powerlessness but a spirit of learning and partnership. For my part, I have an opportunity to learn about a vast, vast array of plants.

Fun fact since you made it all the way here: the nursery came with piles and piles of props from the movie 10,000BC. Giant fake trees. plastic flowers. Yup. The previous owner designs sets for movies, and 10,000BC was the big break. So it's a mess but if you wade your way through all the movie props, there's an amazing variety of plants and extraordinary plant knowledge. It's a special place for a lot of people in this area, including us. So in that spirit we present: Heart & Soil. Please go and visit, or tell friends in Cape Town about us. There'll be a fake flower in it for you.

11 years
In December, Eug and I celebrated eleven years of marriage with moringa! Eug knows me too well. Well actually, I sent him a link to the moringa seeds, and it happened to be on our anniversary so we're calling it an anniversary gift (um, from both of us to both of us?)

There are definitely going to be moringa trees for sale...

Pig
Right before the New Year, our neighbour brought a pig for Noah to care for. I happened to be at my desk at the time, and by the time I emerged we had a runt pig. The pig was getting hurt by his brothers and sisters, and when it moved in it was still struggling the first couple of days at our place. Now he's doing pretty well-- though he's still tiny. And very intelligent. Aargh.

piglet likes snuggles and getting his back scratched...

Building new safe options for chicks and ducklings.
It's been a little while since we built outbuildings for our ducklings and chicks, as our large structure had been working really well until recently, when mongooses or cats started getting through the mesh and killing off animals in large numbers. So we've converted the large structure into a safe/enclosed structure for young trees-- a kind of mini-nursery. In the drought, our property has much better water options than the nursery so we can keep sensitive trees here rather than at Heart & Soil.

Eug has moved the large chicken enclosure and is making a system where we have 3 small enclosures for chicks and ducks to rotate through. We're not buying anything new in doing this project, we're just trying to make a better system with what we have. It's really painful to lose 2-3 animals a night, so we're hoping this will to dissuade predators (Once they don't have success for a while, they move on-- our rats are good eating, guys!).

Noah made the guinea pig a Christmas tree

Summer harvest.

Partying the New Year

New coup (for night time, and hopefully for sitting hens)

A hinged tortoise arrived on our property

Very small hatch-- one of hens only hatched out a single chick. Oh well.

These are some seeds from a seed sharing group of African women. It makes me so excited and happy to be growing some of these seeds on the farm. I'm going to save the corn for next year (when I have infrastructure), but I'm growing okra and many different beans.

Our first pumpkin of the year. I can just barely carry it. 

Our male duck, Male seems to be slowing down and we've not been getting many hatchlings from our broody ducks, but our grey duck-- Fluffy-- just hatched out eight babies. We'll keep a male from this batch so that Male can live out his days in peace and we can keep breeding ducks now and then.

School gardens

I've been really busy with two school gardens at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, as part of my role as a researcher. I'm not a professional when it comes to making urban gardens... I have a lot to learn, but I'm helping to start them because I'm able to leverage my time and sometimes a little funding as a researcher. If you're interested in following along, I'd really appreciate you following Nourishing Spaces, and checking out project videos that come out as the school garden work evolves. In the videos, we'll try not to make more of the project than it is-- these gardens are not going to make anyone healthy in and of themselves, nor solve systemic injustices. We'll just try to make the gardens as good as they can be, over time and through partnership.

Our kids are also starting their own channels on YouTube, so it seems to be becoming a family thing. I'll link to them once they're properly up and running. Noah and Eli really enjoy using ProCreate, an app on the iPad, to draw, and are gradually learning how to animate. Noah is loving listening to audio books, since we learned we could borrow 3 books a month from the Cambridge public library system. I've been reading a lot of Dick King-Smith and W.J. Corbett books to the boys for the last month or so. Hana is not so into books yet, but she has lots of other loves (including YouTube)!

Lent, raising money, vegetable gardens

March is a special time for us. We started a Lenten-type practice with our old church in Boston about ten years ago. For the 40 days before Easter, the idea is to reflect on Jesus as best we can, and ask for what we truly want or need, with the premise that this is a good way to experience God’s presence. The process is profound for me because I don’t often step back, pray, or think about my deepest needs in any sustained way.

As part of Lent, Eug and I give up watching TV shows for the month of March. This year we are also doing intermittent fasting. I generally approach the fasting (from both TV and food) with vague dread. More often than I like to admit, a 40 minute show and cup of hot chocolate at the end of the day is the highlight of my day. When lent begins, I go through a slump the first few days. I find the space and silence alarming— I hate how slowly the time passes getting Hana to sleep without having our laptop open! Then suddenly, a few days in, it’s ok, sortof peaceful and calm. Eug and I talk a bit more than usual, I’m more aware of the kids’ need for some special moments in their day (as now I share this moment with them rather than seeking it after they’re asleep), I think more about the big picture.

This month, thinking about the big picture led me to ask for money, which is new for me and may be a bit odd and creepy. With buying the nursery, Heart & Soil (Yup, now you can like it on Facebook!) there have been opportunities for jadedness, cynicism and fear to creep in. The harshness of our economic system is much more personal than previously, and not knowing how to change it in the very small, personal space of our own tiny business. In fact, it’s pretty hard not to perpetuate that system. The act of land ownership itself, one could argue, is fraught. Yet I am convinced it’s better than saving with Apple and Visa stocks because it’s right there in front of us: we’re responsible for how we treat people and how we create value, it’s not spread between a million shareholders who want to see their stock value increase. In this grey area that is ownership, there is space to make progress, to the current limits of our faith.

Here is where the narrative “I’m busy and don’t have bandwidth to take on a new project” was initially paralyzing— I am indeed busy, at least by my standards, and my worry is often that I will not be left with enough energy to give my kids and Eug. Yet there is also this subtle burden brought by the desire to limit and to say no when good things require attention. In a quiet moment I almost immediately felt this narrative of busy-ness is just one narrative-- though there a physical limits to what I can do, obviously. Being happily busy with things that one is called to is surely life-giving.

In this vein… Eug and figured out that the next step for us is converting a portion of the nursery land into a market garden. Historically, vegetables have been grown haphazardly at the nursery— between rocks and rubble, probably on the down-low. It started when one of the employees at Heart & Soil suggested that he had friends and family who wanted to buy Zimbabwean vegetables, and suggested we should grow them on site.  Yet vegetable gardens are not profitable (well, nurseries are not profitable either, most of the time, but that’s a story for another day) but they can still support people, if the overhead and initial outlay can be somehow covered— support people by supplying organic greens, support people by stabilizing employment. One could argue that producing green, growing, stuff is the one thing that SHOULD be profitable. Again, I digress.

Given the out-of-pocket costs of the nursery, we had reached the limits of what we could do, and thought of asking for help. Asking for help means we need to be accountable to others in a different way than if we were doing it all ourselves, that it is not an act of sacrifice or altruism but a collective attempt at arbitrage— leveraging money, skills and social capital to do something that potentially ripples out positively. The ripples are not a sure thing, and they are little ripples not big waves. We're not trying to be heroes or save anyone. Still, I feel totally invested in the attempt.

Thank you for reading this long spiel, and for any thoughts you can send our way- I’ll keep you updated as we set up the market garden-- hopefully we'll make strides in April.

Noah found this gecko all wrapped up in a spider's web, wriggling around. It was incredibly hard to get the sticky net off it-- it was completely encased. Interfering with nature never felt so good (no pity for the spiders, who have more flies than they could ever dream of)

Change, growing lots of vegetables, planning my parents' house.

Our street seems poised to change from primarily rural to... we're not quite sure what. So as a psychological exercise, I thought I'd write down some of my thoughts here. Our fears are rooted in the recognition that for all our dreaming, work and building, the day-to-day stuff we can't control-- whether we get in trouble for our crazy rooster and the building material constantly piling up, whether there's bike-killing traffic, whether your kids can safely go down the street-- can start to crowd out other stuff. We have neighbours who once farmed in other parts of Cape Town, and had to leave their farms because of safety -- and where daily theft forced them to stop farming, and that is also something that is on my mind. Change can feel as though the dreams we've cultivated are tenuous somehow, that they can be taken away quite rapidly.

Which made me consider the dreams themselves. As we moved to the farm we stepped onto a particular path, not just into a particular space. The space seems deeply important-- not only our house but also our fruit trees and the work I've put into the soil. Yet what's perhaps surprising is the number of things we can take with us if we ever have to leave: we're learning and internalizing ideas and lessons about growing food, bringing up our kids, being sortof-off-grid. Year-to-year, there'll be more things that tie us to this place and there'll also be ways in which the land is giving to us gifts in the here and now, in which we don't have to worry about the future.

A friend asked if I stopped blogging regularly because all our dreams of farming or unschooling or working at stuff we enjoyed were already fulfilled, and I was thinking about how it doesn't feel like that for me-- there's constant space for growth.* It feels like over the next ten or twenty years, we can continuously create a more beautiful productive space, but each year we learn stuff, and we change whether or not that beautiful space in my mind ultimately comes to be. And each year, there are things that do well and things that fail-- things that the kids love about being here, things that they don't love.

Ultimately, this farm, and now the nursery, is under our stewardship for as long as it is given to us (we hope for a good long time-- don't worry mom!), but I don't want to feel aggressively protective of it-- I want to hold on loosely, even if it goes against my controlling personality. Maybe that's where accumulation of property or money is particularly problematic-- they become markers that signal whether our lives are going well or poorly.

In the long-term, I hope we can be progressively more radical in our understanding of growth, as these outward measures don't speak to growth in our ability to communicate, our ability to know our own heart, our ability to convey kindness, to relate to those close to us in a non-manipulative way. All these things are not things that we are born with, even if we are "kind", there are different kindnesses for different circumstances.

Pig is doing very well... and has a lot of character.

All roads lead to vegetable gardening
These days, I spend a lot of my time thinking about vegetables. I've been growing vegetables-- at least a little bit-- since I started this blog ten or eleven years ago. For a while, I gardened on our fire escape in the summers in Boston-- probably in contravention of fire code. For a while in Observatory, Cape Town, I was all about urban gardening in a very small space. Then I got really discouraged about the difficulties of how little we produced. For the last two or so years, we've been on our 1-acre smallholding, but the first year or so I did very little vegetable gardening because our hugelbeds were not mature enough and our water access presented real challenges.

This year, I've been thinking a lot about our own vegetable garden, as well as about two school vegetable gardens (one for a preschool, another for a primary school) and also about creating a market garden at our nursery.

All in all, this has involved a lot of planning and a lot of gardening relative to previous years. Absolutely NOT all successful, but still, a lot of food produced. As with everything, gardening is an exercise in grappling with control-- doing what you can, knowing what is in the realm of possibility, and leaving some stuff alone. What I'm learning is that there are a lot of ways to garden successfully, and that just trying lots of different stuff, and being willing (and lets be honest, having the time, money and energy) to keep trying eventually leads you to good things. So it's just worth just trying.

I re-read Fukuoka's work recently (and also went down the rabbit hole of Korean Natural Farming), and what struck me in re-reading was not the techniques, but the journey. I'm convinced by the idea of working with nature rather than against it, but I think the process of figuring that out for each space is actually quite winding and indirect.

When I feel discouraged, as though growing on this scale is not efficient or that I kill too many plants, I think it's valuable to remember that most of the world's food is produced by smallholder farmers, on a very small amount of land. Large scale agriculture is what is inefficient and unsustainable. We often get fed a message that big farmers feed the world, but that is not true. While I don't really believe the average person can grow all their vegetables on a space the size of a door, just because a lot urban agriculture pinterest boards are not terribly realistic doesn't mean you can't grow a lot in a small space, over time, once you get to know your conditions and adapt to fit your circumstances. [I also think that it is meat and dairy-based diets that need larger farms, as this is where I have found it hardest, and most inefficient, to figure out how to be self-sufficient].

When I produce yucky tomatoes, I can cut the bad bits out, give them to the chickens or ducks or pig or worms, and eat the rest. When large scale farmers produces yucky tomatoes (and I'm convinced if you're gardening completely organically, you'll always have quite a lot of not-up-to-standard tomatoes) their options are much more limited, so the pressure to produce good looking tomatoes, at whatever environmental cost, is so much higher.

On our farm, as I plan better for the future, I begin to see a way to produce all our vegetables and fruit and quite a few of our calorie crops pretty efficiently. Not all our calories, by any means, but a lot of food nevertheless, and we're creeping up calorie wise. At the school garden, suddenly it doesn't take much to produce all the greens needed for two schools for lunch for 160 kids, even if we can't produce a lot of other items just yet.

Propagation by cuttings
With the weather cooling down, it feels like we finally emerged on the other side of a very hard summer. Some of our nursery stock died, some survived. On the other side, I've learned about cuttings. I even have a pair of secateurs in the car, in my bag, or even in my pocket, to whip out if someone has something nice sticking out over their fence... My kids are a mixture of embarrassed and totally into it. 

Propagation (and growing all our ginger and tumeric indoors, since our climate is not warm enough to grow it outside)

My parents' house: Connecting to the grid
We're looking forward to having my parents living with us on the farm, hopefully later this year. After six months of waiting, we thought our building plans for my parents little house were close to being approved, but not yet. It's been a really long and painful process.

So, you ask, will my parents house be off-grid? Will it be built with mud and hay? Sandbags? Tires?No, sadly none of the above. We did pursue the possibility of building with sandbags but we weren't successful -- the combination of expertise, availability, affordability and council approval is pretty challenging to get right. I hope if we ever build another structure, I hope it will be something exciting and fun (TIRES-- earthships-- are still my favourite), but this time around we feel ok about building small, but pretty conventionally.

On being off-grid-- sortof. We'll going to have many of the things we have at our house that only increase our standard of living (consider this the definitive list of things that won't significantly impact on your happiness): (1) low-pressure Solar geyser (water heater) on the roof, (2) household water going out to greywater systems-- moringa trees and banana trees, hopefully, (3) rainwater tanks (4) composting bucket toilet.

So I guess the main thing that isn't on there is our PV solar panels. Having those, rather than municipal electricity, does significantly impact our standard of living (no fridge or booster for the geyser on the roof, so sometimes no hot water) and we're pretty sure we're messing up our battery because in winter we sometimes want to use our computers at night. 

Anyway, I'm still really excited to be hopefully close to building my parents' house, and also to growing a lot of stuff on their corner of the property-- I haven't grown anything there because we knew their house would be coming, but once their house is up we'll be growing a lot more.

Noah tried out his first day-camp last week, where he learned ukulele, trampoline, and hula. Felt like a milestone-- our boy is growing up...

*I slowed down blogging because I figure there's enough content out there on elimination communication (replace with any hippie topic), and I don't care enough to evangelize on any one life choice. I also decided around the same time that I didn't want to monetize the blog.

August 2018: building my parents' house, no electricity, no drainage, no stove

Noah started a YouTube channel of his own...

My parent's house is built. This time around, the person managing the build was lovely, and we were able to implement all we learned from our last construction attempt (just you wait until we build a third house... no...wait...).

another red house!

As with all construction/renovation -- in our family at least-- things started to get really hard at one point around two months ago. We had no electricity, little water, no drainage (our greywater system was dug up to make way for my parents' house). We also had some unsettling break-ins, and our whole family got unusually sick. All the while Eug was taking a very active role building parts of the house, and I had to keep up with work and both of us still need to care for our kiddos (who, admittedly, have been playing a lot of minecraft).

Previously when I had heard about homesteader burnout, my response was a pretty smug, "you don't know how tough I am." I am sorry for that smugness. I think burnout is very normal because homesteading is often illogically difficult, and when you're in the thick of it you can't remember exactly why you're sitting cold, dark and sick in a modern city. Self-righteousness just feels stupid! At that point, we often end up at the McDonald's playground, though this time we didn't-- not because we're above it but just because somehow the brief satisfaction no longer feels worth it (if you want to get serious about being frugal, buy a nursery and track all non-essential spending to how much more you could pay your employees.. no wait, don't! Seriously, though, the nursery has changed my experience of money in a pretty visceral way.).

In these experiences, we are learning homesteading is less about self-sufficiency and more about learning about deep interconnectedness-- our dependence on the grid, on not having our stuff stolen, on the weather and our surrounding ecology/soil, on technology, on our fragile health. Even though we can sometimes produce some of our own food, we're inherently vulnerable, and understanding that vulnerability increases our empathy for those around us who are indeed cold, in the dark, and sick (and maybe even hungry) in our supposedly modern city. It's still possible to keep learning from our mistakes and to slowly work on resilience-- not to make ourselves invincible but to learn to be more peaceful, empathetic, and hopefully less exploitative.

Part of resilience seems to be making peace with hardship and imperfection, and being able to cope with our own smallness and lack of control and knowledge. For the first time, in the thick of it, we haven't just fantasized about moving somewhere where we imagine we wouldn't have problems: we're rooted here, at least for the next while. I am constantly learning new things I didn't know I didn't know. There's a spiritual dimension to this process, which for me takes the drudgery away and replaces it with a sense of wonder.

In hard times, there's anger and indignation and a sense of helplessness-- perhaps it is this age of Trump (though perhaps there is also the Eritrean-Ethiopian peace to look to in amazement and hope). I am not sure where it comes from or where it will go, but there is injustice and inconsistencies in our own lives that could take a lifetime to work out, so perhaps it is not right to direct anger towards an other (Here I don't mean to advocate apathy). Again, there is something to be said for empathy in absurd situations, for the bigness and goodness of God, and tapping into that rather than into the despair enacted around us.

Hana has been cutting her hair and, unrelatedly, bringing a lot of grass to Bubbles...

Minecraft and orange juice...

Potato planting. Our vegetable garden has been a bit of mess with grass taking over, but we've planted a lot of potatoes  and garlic because that was what I could wrap my head around, and with a few hours work I'm cautiously optimistic about the growing season ahead.

With building we haven't had time to think too much about farming -- either starting seeds or caring for fruit trees. Thankfully it is winter, so watering is taken care of by the rain. Perhaps because of the winter, we still had a fair amount to eat from the garden, and there's quite a bit of self-seeded vegetables emerging. I can see that a little bit of consistent work (primarily involving improving the soil) over several years is cumulative-- we may well get as much food this summer as last summer, despite my lack of attentiveness. Having kids is also helpful- I plant with them, with more attention to the process and less to whether we'll grow anything. I figure a pack of seeds is a pretty affordable homeschool lesson, right? And over time, we have a garden.

On optimism: I remember two early goals on my farm googledocs spreadsheet: to have around 20 granadilla vines throughout the farm, and to have around 10 tamarillo trees. I struggled to start tamarillos from seed, and granadillas kept being destroyed by ducks or weevils. At the time it seemed impossible and things kept failing. Two years later, this goal is no problem-- 16 granadilla vines are already well established and some more are newly planted on my parent's fence, with plenty (60 or so) ready to be sold or planted depending on space and irrigation. We were able to get just one tamarillo to a good size, and it fruited this past fall. I planted some tamarillo seeds from this one fruit haphazardly (aah, to have an abundance of seeds instead of the pitiful 10 included in those seed packs) and now I have maybe 100 tamarillo seedlings (though they still need to survive planting into the ground.) Anyway, gradual incremental learning and soil/infrastructure development is meaningful, and the historical view is always helpful when we're facing challenging times.

Also helpful: going to visit penguins at low tide, before any tourists arrive.

(running alongside, not towards-- we respect the penguins' space! )

While Eugene and I have generally been a little tired and worn out with the many demands of the last couple of months, we press on! I'm guessing that many more happy, exciting and hopeful updates on our farm will follow- and many more photos!

September: Coffee, Ducky Duck, froglings, snakes, and working on the house

Eug's mom and brother are visiting for a month, so I expect the October update will be full of all kinds of adventures. Hopefully we'll make them feel comfortable on our farm (as compared to a high rise apartment in Seoul). For now... here are some things we were up to in September.

Coffee

This month I managed to find coffee plants for the first time in Cape Town. I've gotten green beans to germinate, but they never survived. We need 15-20 mature, happy, plants to be self-sufficient in coffee, so we'll not get there any time soon. Still, it's a fun experiment. Until we have a greenhouse (shadecloth, not glass, given our climate), we're limited by what will fit in our house. So far thats 2 small Arabica trees, and one Robusta. Robusta are probably better suited to our climate, but Arabica is supposedly a lot tastier. So maybe we'll do a mix of the two. The Robusta plants are also a lot cheaper...My faithful neighbourhood nursery has 1m trees for just R30 ($2) whereas the Arabicas, at another nursery, cost R90 each for much tinier plants ($6). I'm hoping to have 8 trees by the end of the year, but don't tell Eug that I'm planning to turn our tiny house into a coffee forest.

This month we had a lot of baby frogs in our reservoir, as well as lots of new growth and .... ducklings! I'm so excited about the ducklings-- just watching them run around is quite addictive (for Hana also), though it's clear we have a lot of learning to do: 

So, onto our ducklings...

Our first batch of ducklings included eight that the mother kept, as well as one egg that she abandoned. Mommy duck just brought the egg out from her nest and dumped it near our house, where we witnessed it hatching about 36 hours before all the others. The abandoned duckling immediately imprinted on us and became a full time job, with a tiny duck following us everywhere. This is an important moment to note that we don't have dogs or cats because we're not really sure we can handle the responsibility. Eli said "you and daddy can take care of Hana, Noah and me will take care of Ducky." Eug tried various things to get our duckling adopted by another adult duck, but no luck, the duckling was certain it is human. Eug drew the line when it desperately wanted to sleep on our pillow, nuzzled into my neck. The good news was that it ate a fair number of the flies in the kitchen/living room. [What we learned: we need to make a brooder so that if we have abandoned ducks, we have somewhere to put them straightaway.]

And then when I was out with the kids and Eug was working outside with Ducky with him, the mother came and throttled the duckling. Enough to really injure her, though we were hopeful and kept her close and held her a lot. She died in the night in Noah's bed, at just one week old. There was this clear moment when s/he crossed from farm animal to something else. It was somewhere between catching flies for her and her taking baths with the kids and squeaking if she couldn't see one of us. Then she was gone and it was weird because she was just a little one-week-old duckling, whose brothers and sisters we're still planning on eating (that's a contradiction for another day). And we are really, really sad. Noah especially. He wanted her to come back, and I wanted to tell him that it would be ok, but death is not like that. All that seemed to be left was an opportunity to be changed by that week of life and by the strange ways that family grows and is shaped unexpectedly. 

Our second batch of eggs included 10 babies that hatched, plus 3 unhatched eggs. There was some confusion on the part of the ducklings about where they belonged, which almost led to some duckling murders by first-time-mothers who didn't want to end up with ducklings that weren't theirs. For now, it seems ok. We hope.

The third batch included 17 eggs! They'll hatch out in a couple of weeks. We are ultimately going to eat these ducks as our primary source of meat, fully aware of the gravity and pain of doing so, and also fairly convicted that its appropriate. It's definitely easier to buy meat at the shops!

Protests for free education

In other news: Like last year, there are student protests (joined by some faculty) at UCT over fees and the call for free education. Like last year, I did not physically join in as I do not know how or when. For what it's worth, I stand beside the protestors in spirit and agree that there are many kinds of violence; that it is violence to be born poor in South Africa, and that there is absolutely nothing romantic or simple about it. And yet. Possibility and potential shouldn't be defined or reliant on government decisions, by state education. It is and so I stand beside the protestors in spirit, even as I wonder how to restore the centrality of farming...and generally learning to take care of a lot of menial tasks ourselves... convinced that rural life is legitimate and potentially wonderful.  

We've lived on our smallholding a year now and we're not doing a good job yet of sharing with others. Mainly, living next to a township is overwhelming-- in a way that it may not be for someone who isn't from this country-- where my privilege seems to swell directly from the experiences of my neighbours. Farming is really hard, and it would be a whole lot harder if we were depending on it for our livelihood. But it's also a way of gradually opting out of a lot of exploitative industries, and embracing the fact that life is always hard, always hard work, (perhaps always complicated). The bit that changes is the nature of the hard work. I don't have a good plan except to try to give away more, and to figure out how to do well with less, and pray/be open for insights and ideas as the days go by. 

Here are some pictures from the month!

Firstly, a memory of a duck who thought he was human:

Ducky ducks favourite place to sit. (You can also see the seating that Eug built this month, also in preparation for visitors from Korea)

homeschooling with guinea pig in drawer.

snake attacks bug.

tiny tadpole-frog

praying mantis lays eggs in car seat... mmmm....

Eug and Hana prep bathroom for his family visiting from Korea

Eggeater snake stealing eggs. You should see how big its mouth has to get to swallow one.

8 baby ducks having their first swim. The black one on the right was drowned by another female yesterday (also at one week of age), so now we're keeping the ducklings with their mom in a small A frame coop.

Mommy duck. Instincts are horrible and awesome.

Random stuff:
If you want to read about food, check out the weekly roundup of the Society of Food Anthropology, where I alternate with David Beriss on sharing food stories from around the web.

Lastly, if you're in South Africa and want to save seeds, check out this seed savers activist guide! Write to me if you live nearby and would like to save and exchange seeds!

Candles, Beer and Finding our Place

This past week we visited Montebello Design Centre in Newlands. It's a lovely place for families to hang out and explore. The small nursery is beautifully well-designed and personal, and gave us plenty of ideas for our tiny concrete garden. This is what we got while we were there: 

A resident Kenyan artist sold us these upcycled candles. He melts old wax to make these candles from old soda cans. I'm going to take them back after they burn out, and ask him if he can use up the leftover wax and the cans again.

Montebello is almost too perfect. It's an artist utopia, the cafe is a tent with a huge sprawling tree in the center, and the nursery evokes a secret garden. If it were in Boston, there wouldn't be a but (or the "but" would be further away and easier to avoid thinking about?).... 

...But in Cape Town, you can't escape the juxtaposition of these havens which seem to shield us from the gritty reality just one street, or one suburb over. Informal settlements are supplying labour to our cities, and they've been compared to both concentration camps and refugee camps, though they have no walls. At Montebello, white South Africans would never know that we're in the tiny minority. I don't have any wise answers, and I can't speak to social change at the political level, but I think the tension is something we have to grapple with and make decisions about. Can these enclaves exist if there were no informal settlements? What will South Africa look like in twenty years? What should it look like?

So I'm working on using the car less and trying to find haven on the next street, or even inside our own home. I want to be fully invested in our community, even as I show Noah and Eli the beauty of the ocean and the mountains around us. We live near to a very beautiful river, the Liesbeek,  with incredible bird life. I took Noah there yesterday and found it full to the brim of plastic waste- we retrieved an old plastic crate (to the amusement of a couple of lookers on- it's more difficult to get things from a river than one thinks, and more disgusting). There were also homeless men living in a small island on the river, using tarp as a makeshift tent. 

Lives that revolve around car-transport can easily bypass those parts of the city that are scary or dirty, bouncing us between artificial realities, rather than making our immediate neighborhoods really work or confronting our fears of the unknown. I speak to myself: our lives have quickly become car-oriented, despite not having a work commute, but I'm beginning to see alternatives: I signed us up for a library card so we get our reading material from the tiny Obs library, we visit the park and the river, and Noah is gradually getting used to spending time at home, inventing games as we imagine our garden as it's own haven. Although Eli is too young for the bike seat, Noah goes for rides with Eug and we are so excited at the news that Albert road is going to be getting a proper bike lane. The roads in Obs are very narrow- often too narrow for two-way traffic, yet cars park on both sides of the street and trucks get stuck after they take a wrong turn and wind up in our neighborhood. I wonder if we can imagine something different- a truck free neighborhood?

In other news, Eug bottled his first batch or beer. Noah took on the important role of bottle cap provider, and I am the resident dumpster diver- for bottles and crates. Dumpster diving in Cape Town is totally unromantic: whereas in Boston I was looking for great food and even beautiful furniture, here I'm looking for bits of wire, plastic crates, old bits of wood, pallets, and old glass beer bottles. And they're pretty hard to find. 

Although we don't dress him very well, Eli is still just about as awesome as anything.

January and February 2018: sharks, salty water, waiting for rain

Thanks to donations of large amounts of water from farmer's dams and farmers being cut off, the water situation seems... better in Cape Town as a whole, with our day zero moved back substantially.

With two acres, now, and responsibility for 2 intensive school gardens, I feel more like a farmer-- in this drought, I sympathize with farmers more and more, the more my livelihood (or at least my actual day-to-day life) feels tied up with the experiences of farmers. (side note: we have a new president! Yay! And, on the empathizing with farmers note, I feel simultaneously happy and terrified about land expropriation without compensation. YES! Finally movement on land issues! Eeek! Wait! Not my land please!) Our nursery water has turned salty, so we're trying to figure out what to do-- our nursey stock is dying rapidly and we have to decide whether to water with salt water or not water at all-- which feels like no choice at all. Unlike iron, salty water is very hard to fix... so we're praying that it is seasonal and the salt content goes back down once there's been proper rain. I've learned that having a struggling nursery is intense, even if one goes in knowing it is struggling.

But otherwise, apart from some rats eating our ducklings, the animals are well, the vegetables are relatively ok (no thanks to you, MOLE RATS) and the trees are almost through the summer. Soon, things will cool down and I believe in my gut that next summer will be easier.

We only have one guinea pig, but he's living the good life-- we've finally found an option that works pretty well. Guinea pigs outside don't work because of predators. There's guinea pig poop everywhere, but he's a very happy guy.

Uncomfortable. Cat pretending to be interested in a spot on the floor. Guinea pigs knows from experience she's faking it. No, I don't know why there's bloody toilet paper in the corner. It's human blood though, if that helps.

Bubbles gets to eat the freshest produce in the family. He has his own farm-in-a-pot.

At rest.

We found the body of a small shark floating in the ocean, and brought it home for further examination.

Hana was convinced it was a doll for a while.

Noah did a dissection, with the help of Sam's dissection kit and a shark model that Meera sent us!

Our goose keeps nibbling everything because he's a bit blind and thinks everything is food. 

If you're on instagram (I'm not yet...) Eug is at https://www.instagram.com/ebillustrated/ 

Our first bunch of bananas is maturing. It has taken ages and we are extraordinarily grateful...

Noah remains the only person who can pick up Henry II when he ventures into illegal territory.

Our male goose seems to have had a stroke. He's doing ok, but we have to nurse him a fair bit-- he's like a very old man.

Sometimes people say how lovely it is that our kids play outside so much etc. But I think it's worth noting that they spend a ton of time doing various things on the iPad, also. I think there's plenty of time for both. 

Noah is really interested in photographing interesting creatures.

 

We have an area of our reservoir dedicated to the protection of frogs. Ok, it's just a pile of bricks. But it does the job. When we actually have water again, we'll have to figure out how to pile them up so that there's always something above the water

It can be hard to find things that bring together all our kids. Noah leading them in starting a fire for tea is one of those unicorn things. a 7yo, 5yo and 2yo Starting an outdoor fire during a drought. What could possibly go wrong. We were watching.

Mint tea.

The kids are really into minecraft legos... The countdown to getting minecraft is on, and I have an alert for whenever minecraft legos are being sold second hand on Gumtree.

This is our first watermelon of the season. I planted Sugar baby-- not sure if this is normal, but I planted 10 seeds, got 4 vines to transplant successfully, and will likely get 4 watermelons total. Which I guess is still cheaper than buying 4 at the shop, right? Right? right. What is cool is that I'm going to have a lot more seeds for next year.

My parents said they always used to store pumpkins on roofs, so I thought I'd store ours on our Jojo rainwater tank. They were too heavy, so now they're back on the table. 

We started out with a good pumpkin and butternut harvest, as well as really good amounts of zucchini, but sadly it's slowing down as disease starts to hit, and we're starting to get a lot of shield bugs laying their eggs in the zucchini and butternut. Here is where there are probably some important lessons to be learned about figuring out the best calculus between size of garden, the amount of labour available, the amount of composting materials available, and what we actually eat. I generally try to grow a lot of things that are expensive at the store (peppers, tomatoes) but these don't necessarily provide a lot of calories. Even though there's so much still to figure out, I'm so glad to be starting to actually harvesting stuff!