A picture of home | by Mariella

I am currently on business in Munich, so I`m writing to you from a keypad that requires a little more concentration than usual! I`m only here for a week and it`s autumn here which means that the streets are lined with bright yellow leaves. When people ask me where i come from and what my home is like, this is what comes to mind, I try to communicate it to them, but there`s nothing like home!

Companion planting | by Mariella

Plants don’t grow in isolation, they grow together! This is obvious, right? But what I find so interesting is that plants do not always make good neighbours. Some vegetables, when planted together, turn out sweeter, stronger, seemingly immune to attack from pests. But when you get the combination wrong, plants seem to experience stunted growth and are weak or more susceptible to attack from harmful bugs and disease.

Companion planting takes into account: the proximity of plants which have adverse or beneficial effects on one another, planting of plants which are beneficial to the soil and plants which attract friendly insects or act as natural pesticides and herbicides in strategic places in your garden.

Comfrey is every gardener’s ally.  Its leaves are extremely high in potassium, nitrogen, calcium and other nutrients, making it the best natural fertilizer. Just remember not to eat any part on the plant though; this is food for your garden, not for you! Mix the leaves with boiling water and let the ‘tea’ rot for a month or so. It smells grizzly but the plants love it!

I would recommend getting a book on the subject if you are starting your own vegetable patch as it helps when you haven’t had the opportunity to observe which plants make good bedfellows!

There are some plants, especially herbs which attract helpful insects into your garden, doing the job of pest control for you. The flowers of angelica, borage, mint, buckwheat, Californian poppy, carrot, chamomile, chives, coriander, crimson clover, dill, Echinacea, fennel, garlic, golden rod, lavender, lemon balm, marigold, marjoram, mustard, nasturtium, parsley, rocket, rose scented geranium, rosemary, sage, sunflower, tansy, thyme, yarrow will attract insects like bees, dragonflies, damselflies, spiders, ladybirds – which can eat a whopping 400 aphids a day, lacewings, praying mantises into your garden. 

It’s so rewarding to hear the buzz of your little helpers already at work in your garden when you get there first thing in the morning. They've been awake and productive for hours, they love my garden and I love them, it’s companionable! 

Did you know that borage makes strawberries sweeter? And that fennel should not be planted near beans, tomatoes, kohlrabi or coriander, but it’s great as a flea repellent when scrunched in your hand and rubbed into your dog’s coat? Rows of wood ash in your beds will deter slugs. Garlic and parsley grown near Roses will help keep them pest free.

No one knows why it works, chalk it up to one plant liking the way another plant smells, but it comes from generations of observant farmers and if you’re going to take the time and effort to plant something in the ground and will it to live through hard work and love, you may as well surround it with buddies, so that together, they don’t get bugged!

Why compost toilets are a good idea! / Mariella

Now that we’ve gotten to know each other better, I’d like to tell you about my toilet! When my husband and I spoke about the design for our house, we felt very strongly about not having a flush toilet. If you take into consideration that the average toilet uses about six litres per flush and the average family member may use the bathroom five times a day. That comes to ten thousand, nine hundred and fifty litres of water down the drain per annum. In a water strapped South Africa, this is possibly going to become a problem! Toilets use more water than anything else in the home, including washing machines.

We took this very seriously and opted for a compost toilet. We built a temporary structure for it while we decide on the final design of the out house and because we couldn't find a locally produced complete unit which had good reviews, we made our own! It’s basic, you have two boxes, made from plywood, same size, ours are roughly one meter square, with a toilet seat on top, which we made so that it seals nicely and a hooded chimney pipe for ventilation. It’s only for number two and you tip a couple cups of saw dust in after every use. Toilet paper goes in too. Every couple of months we throw some good bacteria in and once the box is full, we seal it up and use the other one. Once box number two is full, box number one should be completely worked through and benign. It takes about a year to fill a box and once it’s ready, you throw it out into a corner of the garden and leave it there for another six months and then it can be used in your flower beds. I was terrified to see what would come out of that box, but once we tipped it out, it didn’t look any different from the soil around it. One square meter of fuss to deal with per year, instead of ten thousand, nine hundred and fifty litres of water which needs cleaning! 

And it’s outside with a great view of the sunset and the birds that fly overhead to and from the coast every day!

So, what to do if you live in a built up area and can’t realistically consider a compost toilet overlooking your neighbours’ kids’ jungle gym?

If you want to save water and you haven’t replaced your toilet with a dual-flush model yet, do it now! By doing this you can reduce water consumption by a whopping 20% or more. But something that you can do today would be to take an old 2 litre plastic bottle, fill it with water and put it inside the cistern of your toilet and save 2 liters per flush.

Another water tip: This is the easiest and cheapest way to reduce water loss. Turn the taps off when brushing your teeth! This will save you about fifteen litres for every single minute the tap is turned off.

All very serious stuff I know, but these are little ways in which we can actively take nature conservation into our own hands and it’s a great opportunity to inform our children about water saving.

                                                                                                           

We are building our own home! | by Mariella

Living in a tipi for two years (see “Lessons from a tipi” post) helped me realize what I want out of a home. I no longer take any comforts for granted. And I've rediscovered some of them, like doors that close! And lock!!

Going back to simple living brought us to the decision to take the building of a more sheltered more permanent home into our own hands. My husband built our home himself, alone mostly, on the deck we built for the tipi.

We took certain things into account when working on the design of our home.

-We built the deck in a natural clearing in the forest, so only a few saplings were taking out and many were redirected. It was essential for us to not destroy the forest in favour of building a home which overlooks it!

- There was a big Cheesewood tree next to the clearing and we designed the pitch of the room to accommodate the tree so that none of the larger branches had to be removed.

-Living in the tipi brought us into a closer relationship with our natural surroundings and that was something that we didn't want to lose. We wanted to incorporate outside living as much as possible and we kept the living room area as an outside space so that you have to step outside to get to the kitchen, this keeps us close to lunar cycles, the stars, what the little birds are doing. It also means that if you don’t cover your food, those same little birds finish off your breakfast for you!

- Our outside shower ruined me for ever having an indoor shower again! We’ve kept our shower outside, it’s nestled into the trees and it’s so lovely!

- We designed the electrical system to easily switch over to solar. We’ve kept our power needs simple and low impact.

- Big houses are great, but the bigger they are, the more time you spend inside, and the bigger your impact on natural resources, we’ve made our home as small as possible.

- There is so much stuff in the world that we really don’t need to buy anything new ever again! We’ve upcycled as many building materials as possible which means that when I walk through my son’s door, I think of my brother-in-law, when I walk into my daughter’s room, I’m reminded of our friend, Marty, and his wood workshop filled with beautiful driftwood, reclaimed yellow wood planks, antique wooden treasures. There isn’t an area in our home devoid of personality!

- It doesn’t make economical or ecological sense to design a house built from materials which are not found in the area. The Garden Route is covered in forest and plantation, so we obviously used mostly wood. This was an educational process in itself as we would find ourselves having to explain to suppliers why we didn’t want old-growth forest woods like Meranti and Balao and that there are many gums and other South African plantation woods to choose from.   

- We designed for our family and we had fun with it. We made a trap door which leads from our kids’ rooms to the passage (which isn’t built yet!) and painted a road with parking bays on our son’s floor!

They say that building your own home is much like painting a work of art, you never finish it, you just decide, at some point, that you’re going to stop now! We are half way. And the next building frenzy is set to start sometime soon. It’s an exciting process and we had a hand and a say in everything, no funny surprises! As a result I’ve gotten into carpentry and actually made our kitchen counter and work surface. It’s a great feeling and definitely a lesson in focus, clarity and patience!

A little advice on food label reading | by Mariella

There’s an old Greek proverb which states, ‘In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king’.

 I beg to differ.

‘In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is mad’, Patrick Woodroffe, makes a heap more sense to me. Once you open your eyes to something, it cannot be unseen. And if those around you have yet to see it, then your discovery casts you apart.

Take labels for example, once you learn how to read food labels on packaging, never again can you conceive of purchasing an item without ferreting through the disorienting bulk of fine print on the back to find the actual list of ingredients to make sure that it doesn’t come with any unwanted buddies and hidden agendas. And once you take the time to google one of those ingredients, it spirals down into this pit of unfathomably harmful side effects; you’d think the ‘they’ are out to dwindle our numbers with all this dodgy stuff hitching a ride along with our daily staples!

Conspiracy theories aside, label reading is an art. And the more you read labels, the more you begin to wonder,’ Are they trying to trick me?’ My husband discovered my favourite blatantly deceitful label to date on the back of a popular chip brand. It listed the flavourants and then in brackets said (MSG free), and further down the list, somewhere below where you stop reading because there’s no MSG so it must be safe, it says ‘anti-caking agent (monosodium glutamate)’ Now this does make one wonder somewhat about the motives of the manufacturers! 

When reading labels you’ll generally find a dizzying array of lists, columns and possibly foreign languages. ‘Nutritional information’ is very different from ‘Ingredients’, but many people see this and think that this is what they are looking for. 

It’s not. 

The nutritional information listed is a breakdown of the macro and micro nutrients present per 100 gms. It does not tell you what they put in the food. You’ll generally find the list of ingredients in much smaller text and hidden at a funny angle at the bottom, side or on the lid, in a corner listed in order of quantity, from most to least. This makes it easier to find the dodgy stuff which often comes in small lethal doses and can be found at the bottom of the list, so I just start reading from the bottom up!

The conclusions I have reached? Assume the worst and if you find something you can’t pronounce, google it before you purchase it. The down side is that you may find your shopping list instantly edited! But you’ll adjust. It just takes a little time and a lot of faith that the attention you are paying to the details will make all the difference in the larger picture of health for you and your family. 

Our first Market day! | by Mariella

There is nothing quite like putting time and effort into a project you truly believe in and then having it not only turn out well, but exceeding your expectations! 

Our first market day was a huge success! People came! Many! Most of the stalls had sold out by half time, and for a sleepy coastal town, that’s a bonus! We had twenty three handpicked stalls and most stall holders made a great effort to present beautifully. 

A family affair, it's so cool when your kids get involved and help out!

My son and his friend Julia a midst the flowers, the sunflower with the giant 'heart' is his

Our children’s art exhibition started with space for one hundred entries and ended with two hundred and forty! Old Nick Village looked so festive and it really did feel like a real small village farmer’s market. I feel like a proud mama watching my baby take its first steps! Plett’s local radio station broadcasted for the day and, of course, my business partner elected me to be the interviewee! What luck!

Rhian Berning from EcoAtlas

Yum goodies from O' My Goodness

You know when you’re nervous but take your time and really attempt to transcend the nerves and zone into what you are trying to explain? That was me, I was doing ok, stumbling a little at the beginning, but doing ok, and this is when my dear sweet considerate husband started to pull funny faces at me! To burst out laughing on live radio is a definite muscle relaxant! And for this to be the only notable stress factor is a good indicator, we had a great day!

We received many congratulations throughout the day, but now the real work begins! To keep a ball rolling is tougher than to muster the first kick, but it’s all about quality products in the end, and we feel confident that we have a strong mix of local, naturally grown, ethical products. We plan to do a lot of education around this market to try to inform shoppers about making the right choices when buying food for their families, no small feat but it’s achievable in a small town, wish me luck!