An easy new Vegetable Bed for our Veggie garden, here's how ~ Mariella

My husband wasted no time in implementing the more practical information acquired on the Permaculture weekend. 

http://freshearthorganicfood.blogspot.com/2013/11/what-i-learnt-from-permaculture.html

http://freshearthorganicfood.blogspot.com/2013/10/permaculture-festival-and-festival-of.html

Here’s an easy step by step to create a vegetable bed which is a hybrid between a lasagna style bed and a Hugel bed. 

This lovely illustration comes from http://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/many-benefits-hugelkultur A very informative site on Permaculture. 

A lasagna garden bed, also known as sheet mulching, is a no-till, no-dig gardening method that turns materials like kitchen waste, straw, garden clippings, cardboard, newspapers into rich, healthy soil without too much effort.  The name refers to the method of building rich soil by creating layers of organic materials which will ‘cook down’ over time resulting in fluffy, loamy soil. If you want to enrich the soil further you layer compost on top opposed to ever digging the soil up again. 

A Hugel bed is a raised or ‘hill bed’, a gardening and farming technique using wooden logs and big branches as a slow constant source of nutrients releasing over time under the ground, enriching it. This method mimics the natural cycle of nutrients found on healthy forest floors. It also soaks up rainfall and releases it slowly into the surrounding soil.

Step 1

Dig out your bed (Christiaan dug it out 1.5 spades or 40/50 cm deep) and pile the soil up next to the bed.

Step 2

Line the bottom of the bed with large branches and logs, he used thick fynbos. Using large branches slows down the nutrient process and helps hold moisture in the bed.  It’s important to use what you have in your own garden.

Step 3

Put down a thick layer of dry garden stuff like leaves, straw, dry lawn clippings.

Step  4

Layer with thinner twigs and green stuff like fresh leaves, lawn clippings and Comfrey leaves; which adds potassium to the soil and is an excellent compost starter. You can also grow yarrow, dandelion, and stinging nettle specifically to enrich the soil in your beds.

Step 5

Layer of Manure or Bounce back, which is a natural chicken manure in pellet form found at any local garden centre.

Step 6

Put the soil back on top of the bed. This results in a raised bed cooking with nutrients!

Mushroom Picking ~ Mariella

Warning: Do not try this at home without the assistance of a professional! This post is not intended as a tutorial.

 A few years ago we bought a beat up ol’ van from a gypsy and traveled around Britain. We found the forest folk and animals to be friendlier than the town’s people and spent most of our time on the road, in lovely old villages and woodland areas. 

We read the Hobbit by candlelight in the evenings and left the fast paced world behind for a few months. I learnt to knit!

Another habit which stuck was mushroom hunting. My husband had been studying culinary mushroom for years and when Autumn kicked around we found ourselves surrounded by forests full of the types of edible varieties not available in South Africa. 

Wood Blewits

Cauliflower Fungus

We found purple Wood Blewits which grow in Faerie rings, making them easy to find once you’d happened upon the first one, Cauliflower fungus, strange looking, delicious and unfortunately in a drainage ditch in a London park so we had to give it a miss! 

Velvet Shank

Parasol Mushroom

We found Oyster mushrooms and Velvet Shanks, we were chased about the cliff top moors by wild ponies aiming to pilfer our giant Parasol Mushrooms out of our backpacks! And had the stroke of luck to stumble upon a Giant edible Puffball on a country lane in Wales. ‘Good in Soup’ said our Welsh friend, something he said whenever food didn’t quite agree with him! There were many Amanita Muscaria dotting the forest, we gave them a miss, not too tasty.

Fly Agaric or Amanita Muscaria

Giant edible Puff Ball 

We were hooked; we had mushrooms with egg for breakfast, mushrooms with salad for lunch and mushrooms with rice for dinner! We ate new varieties everyday, but the holy grail of varieties we were constantly on the lookout for, except for Chanterelles which we never found, was the Boletus. Boletus Edulus or Porcini in particular. Boletus is a large family of mostly edible mushrooms easier to identify than most because they have sponge underneath instead of gills. They are melt-in-your-mouth-delicious!

 

Mushroom hunting was one thing we missed the most about leaving England and moving to the Garden Route meant that we could take it up again! With no short supply of Pine trees, Boletus is easy to find if you know where and when to look and even though the other varieties are sadly lacking, we content ourselves with all the different Boletus available. We went hunting this week and found enough for a few dinners and to dry. Its best to pick them young, although one should never ‘pick’ mushrooms as it destroys the 'plant' or mycelium and minimizes your chances of finding them in the same place again next time. It’s best to slice them off at the base.

A Pile of Fresh Porcini!

There are so many delicious recipes for Porcini, with its well rounded nutty flavour, but I think my favourite is in an Italian tomato sauce on Pasta, although omelette is also good, and fried in butter with Paneer is also ready delectable. You really can’t go wrong! We pick the young ones only as this gives the older ones a chance to drop their spores and also, the ‘meat’ diminishes and dries out as they get bigger and the bugs dig in too. 

Fully grown Porcini are easy to find but no longer edible

Harvesting from the forest is a great family outing and we took friends whose children hadn't been before. The forest echoed with happy squeals as they found their first mushrooms and we were told several times about the Slippery Jacks and how they were NOT the right ones! Children learn fast!  

   

What I learnt from the Permaculture Festival ~ Mariella

Our MC Stuart Palmer from Lunchbox Theatre
https://www.facebook.com/LBTheatre

The permaculture festival was such an inspirational event, a coming together of like minds in the name of sustainability and knowledge sharing,all the while accommodating, in true permaculture spirit, the constantly evolving natural environment and torrential rains for days prior to the event! 

Try planning and setting up in that! 

But the sun came out for us and it was a raging success. Here are some points I jotted down which have stayed with me throughout this week and will hopefully inform the way I plan and design aspects of my life, from my garden to my business:

~Complex problems often require the simplest of solutions. Don’t over think things. Identify where small action will have the largest effect.

Phillipa Mallac's lovely Heirloom seeds

~There are three basic principles in Permaculture which I’ve covered before.

Care for the planet.

Care for people.

Give away surplus, which takes care of the first two!

When people first hear this they think ‘am I just supposed to give things away?’ Not really, no! We were encouraged, in the first talk of the festival by Alex Kruger to shatter the concept of lack by being fearless in giving away surplus! But this can also be done by swopping out with farmers who have excess of a crop you haven’t grown, or selling excess off at local farmers markets, it also means feeding the excess back into the ground in the form of mulch and compost. See everything as a resource. Just remember one thing, if everybody gives then no body needs!

Peter Mcintosh showing us exactly how to tell if the consistency of your mud brick is good enough to build with!

~ Alex also moved us to re-look at our concept of nature as a static thing which requires one assessment to come to conclusions and actions. It is ever changing and so are we, its acceptable to re-look at things, to adjust The Plan of Action if, somewhere down the road, we or what we are working on, has grown out of the design we’ve created.

The Crags Eco Preschool's food stall was a raging success and great fundraiser.
And their crunchy thingies were yum!

~ Use and value renewable and regenerative resources – these are resources which do not diminish as they are used, such as sunlight and wind.

~Develop a strong sturdy ethical base for your decision making.

Local honey and teas

~Observe and interact. Your success rate increases the more you understand the environment you’re designing for and that takes time. Sit in the site where you’d like your garden to be, watch how the sun moves over the land, see what happens when it rains, where do the strongest winds come from, where's the best view?

~ Look at the yield you seek to obtain – delicious fresh vegetables and fruit, successful business, ecosystem restoration, happy inspired people etc. See these results as a form of positive feedback, put in some well thought out positivity and get a whole lot out.

What would a Permaculture Festival be without Tipis?

~ You know you’re on the right track when you’ve created a system which is self-regulating and self perpetuating, it wont fall apart if you’re not there!

~ Produce no waste. A system which produces waste of ANY kind is not a complete system. Instead of throwing garden refuse away, create a compost pit and turn the ‘waste’ into valuable compost which can enrich the ground. Instead of letting your grey water down the drain, create a grey water system which will help irrigate your garden and manage pollution.

 

 

~ Look at the patterns in Nature and learn from them. Remember to zoom in and out when you design, its so easy to fixate on one fine detail and lose track of the whole.

~ Integrate don’t segregate. Adopt an inclusive attitude when designing your business model/ garden/ home/life. Consider the benefits of including neighbours, colleagues, friends, charities, institutions of learning. Be cooperative not competitive!

 ~ Strength and resilience lie in diversity. Look at nature, at the complexity of one square meter of indigenous forest, how everything works in an interlocking seamless way. Create systems where problems can be solved from more than one source and every element has more than one function. Design safety nets within your system. If you have a sloping garden with water runoff issues, focus on trapping and slowing down water by turning pathways into swales along the contour lines of the land. Fill them with mulch so they may slowly feed the soil and keep it hydrated while combating erosion. 

http://permaculturenews.org/2012/05/16/swales-the-permaculture-element-that-really-holds-water/

We, ourselves, are not mono-cultures either. We are multi-functional and we require the same of our environment.

~ Use edges and value the marginal. This is where ‘things’ accumulate, like a fence line accumulates debris or the waterline on the beach accumulates stones, driftwood, shells. The same can be said of thoughts! Marginalized thought can, before you know it, enrich main stream thought.

~ Creatively use and respond to change. It’s the only thing which is constant!

~ Vision is not seeing things as they are but as they will be!

What stood out for me the most after this course was the feeling that I am not alone, these were my people! I didn’t need to contract or expand to fit. If you do not surround yourself with people who are on the same road as you, your path may be a lonely one ( and slightly mono-culture). Surround yourself with people you can learn from, and keep yourself growing so that you have something to give. Keep the perpetual motor machine going. 

And keep it going in the right direction!   

Check out Berg-En-Dal, a Permaculture Farm Near Ladismith, one of the places in South Africa where the magic happens!

http://www.berg-en-dal.co.za/

Permaculture Festival AND the Festival of Light over my birthday Weekend, I am so excited! ~ Mariella

I am looking forward to the weekend already! Yes I am aware that it is Monday, but it’s my birthday on Saturday and Diwali (Hindu Festival of Light) on Sunday and the Garden Route Permaculture Festival is happening all weekend. I have much to look forward to, but in essence, this year, my party is being arranged by others and that just makes me smile!

Permaculture is a design system which takes its cue from nature which is completely self-sustaining with its beautiful mesmerizing interlocking of micro and macro eco-systems. You don’t ever hear a voice from deep within the planet say, oops I didn’t think of that! Everything in Nature works, and there's much to be learned from that. So permaculture, as I see it, is about emulating the efficiency of nature in designing a lifestyle that works, completely and entirely! Delving into the principles of permaculture and applying them to every aspect of your life from feeding and housing your family to what you do all day every day for a living, gives you the earnest possibly of harnessing and controlling outcome. An unorganized thing is a chaotic thing which constantly yields unwelcome surprises, learning about Permaculture develops in you a real sense of planning before doing and shows you how! I love it, and am learning all the time but learn faster in in a facilitated environment so I signed up for the GRPF immediately!  

They’re going to have speakers covering subjects like 'Permaculture : Balancing People & Planet', Swop Shops: A Green Economic Model for a Cleaner Environment, Challenges Around Urban Food Security & The Need for Social Permaculture at Food Systems Scale, Natural building materials : properties and proper applications,empowering conscious consumers, propagation (how to grow from seeds and cuttings) Compost Making, Earthworms, Garden Bed Design, Companion Planting, Tree Planting and Grey Water Management Systems. I have a keen interest in all these subjects and even though our Vegetable garden works, there is so much room for improvement and growth. I’m  also looking forward to the networking which will happen over the 2 days, meeting people from all over South Africa who live in this frame of mind and asking..asking..asking questions until I get it! The Garden Route can feel a little cut off from the developments occurring in the rest of the world and I’m looking forward to the green market happening in between talks.  And then there’s the music line-up for the evening! There’ll by a ‘blits barter’ at some point which I think is just fantastic to illuminate the old concept of non-monetary currency!

The Festival of Light happens on Sunday! We've been fortunate enough to celebrate the festival of light in Plettenberg Bay for the last five years thanks to the hard work of a Plett local whose key focus is to propagate peace and unity in Plett! The theme this year is ‘Knowledge is power’ and the entrance is free but everyone is encourage to donate a book. This is a non-denominational event for people of all cultural and religious backgrounds to celebrate unity and again, there will be music, theatre, poetry and talks throughout the day and into the evening and a candle lighting moment in the night. I am utterly excited!

Check out Garden Route Permaculture Festival 

on www.ecosynergyevents.co.za

https://www.facebook.com/events/710625095630070/permalink/758441387515107/

And contact Vinthi Neufeld on 082 825 9811 if you’d like to find out more about the Festival of Light. 

https://www.facebook.com/events/669121749764839/

See you there!

Its Artichoke season now! ~ Mariella

The globe artichoke is a variety of thistle cultivated as a food. The edible bits are the flower buds and their stems when harvested before the flowers blooms. The plants usually bear several flowers. Although the flowers are so so pretty, once you’ve allowed them to bloom they are no longer edible.

I am very excited to announce that it is officially artichoke season right now! We have one plant and it is yielding beautifully and we have our first artichokes for supper tonight along with Broad beans out of the garden fried up with homemade Paneer cheese (recipe to follow!). We don’t share well, so we've waited for the right amount to be ready for the plucking. There are many interesting recipes out there but I always make artichoke the way my mamma taught me, simply!

I leave a 5 cm stem on the Artichoke and try my best to wash it, organically grown Artichoke can sometimes reveal unwelcome creepy crawly surprises! The stem is edible when not too mature; if yours is tough just eat the inside.

Steam the whole artichoke until you can easily pierce the heart through the underside of the flower, ie: from the stem up, with a sharp knife. If it goes in easily, it’s done. Be patient, there’s no fun in short changing yourself by under-cooking it, another way to double check is to pull the base leaves off, if they come off easily, it’s done.

Then we simple tear off the leaves one at a time and dip the base of each leaf into a dip made from olive oil, balsamic vinegar, sea salt and pepper and scrape off with our teeth! So delicious! When we get to the heart we remove the fine hairs and discard as they tickle the throat and shouldn’t be eaten, although my dad used to show off by eating the whole thing! 

Then the yummiest thing ever is to allow the heart to marinade in the mix for as long as humanly possible before eating.  

So simple and there is nothing quite like that sweet taste of fresh artichoke heart melting into your taste buds! Mmm delectable!   

How to boil up Beans and Pulses ~ Mariella

It occurred to me the other day that many people don’t know how to cook pulses. I hadn't realized this until I went to a friend’s house who had been soaking beans for many a day wondering all the while why they weren't getting soft enough to fry up and eat! The beans, having been in water for some time, were now frothing and burbling and just about ready to get up and walk away of their own volition. So here’s a quick informational on how to turn a bag of dry beans/chick peas/lentils etc into an ingredient you can actually eat! Whenever I prepare pulses I do the entire pack, that way I save on electricity and time.

Step 1

Start off with organically grown dry goods if possible. Search through the bag for stones and other debris! You can do this by pouring out small quantities at a time into a flat white plate and then tipping them into the pot you intend to use. Trust me, you don’t want to skip this part, let’s just say, I was unpopular with a guest for a while but he didn’t send dentist bills! 

Then soak contents in water overnight. Remember that the pulses will swell up to to about double their size and you don’t want them rising above the water as they wont soak evenly so use a big enough pot and add enough water. Soaking beans reduces cooking time by up to 70%, it also preserves the most proteins, vitamins and minerals. Also, beans are dusty. 

Pulses all have different hardness’s, therefore they require different soaking times and are best boiled up separately. Split lentils don’t require soaking and whole lentils and mung beans can benefit from an hour. All the other beans like sugar beans, kidney beans, chickpeas would be best soaked overnight.

Step 2

Drain out the water, add new fresh water and bring to the boil over high heat. Once it starts boiling reduce, and allow to bubble away until the beans are soft all the way through. Make sure the beans are completely under water otherwise they won't cook evenly. This could take anywhere between 45 min to 1.5 hrs, depending on the beans. Soya beans take ages!

Key point: Do not add salt or sugar while boiling as adding them at this stage will make the pulses more difficult to digest and may cause bloating.

Once you’ve cooked them until soft, strain through a colander and allow to cool, don’t keep the water. Pour into single or double portion bags and freeze. Whenever you want to make beans for supper, just take a bag out in the morning or plop into hot water to defrost. When you make a dish with them you can then add the salt and other spices as needed.  

Voila simple and easy and you’re not buying cans of beans coated with enzyme mimicking plastics which are just baaaad for you!

Seven Ways to Celebrate Spring ~ Mariella

Spring in South Africa does not start on the 1^st of September as we encourag to believe, but on the Spring Equinox which falls on Sunday the 22^nd September at 20:44 this year. An equinox occurs twice a year (around 20 March and 22 September), when the Equator squarely faces the sun. In other words, day and night are equal lengths.

It also means we’re on our way to Summer!

The birds are tweeting,

the bees are buzzing,

if you listen quietly you’ll hear

’Spring is coming!’

We’re going to be celebrating Spring Equinox in a big way this year, it helps that it falls over a weekend. It’s also my Wedding Anniversary! This is how we’ll be celebrating Spring:

 1. Balance an Egg

No really! Rumour has it that you can balance an egg on its end on the day of both Equinoxes. I’ve read some personal accounts and we will be trying this as a family on Sunday morning. I plan to make omelettes to either way we’ll be fine! Try it! Here is Wayne Osborn's (Physics Department, Central Michigan University) take on it, he reckons you can do it at anytime of the year. We will be proofing that!

http://francesa.phy.cmich.edu/people//osborn/egg1.html

 2. Go for a Walk!

Embrace prettiness! Dress up in blooming Spring colours, put flowers on your dog’s collar and take the family for a walk.

 3. Pick Flowers

Seek out beautiful wild flowers on your walk and do a flowers pressing project with your kids, they can turn them into bookmarks and Christmas Cards or works of art once dried.

4. Turn Spring day into Kindness Day

Even though we should be kind everyday, make a point of going out of your way to uplift and make someone else happy on Spring Equinox. Pick flowers along the way for someone you know who could use some Spring Cheer. A neighbour who has one car parked outside now instead of two, a friend who is going through a hard time. They don’t even have to know it was you!

5. Celebrate!

Have a Spring Ball and invite everyone. Tell them all to make their dishes as colourful as possible (without using food dye!) and dress as mythologically as they dare! You could make Spring Rolls! 

6. Gardening

Start a fragrant garden, include all your favourite herbs like Rosemary, Mint and Lavender and hunt down as many different types of Jasmine as you can. Next year this time you’ll be happy you did!

7. Spring Cleaning

Put some screechingly loud music on, order takeaways and commence with Spring cleaning. Look up your closest car boot sale, or set aside a charity box, a clothes swop box, 

http://freshearthorganicfood.blogspot.com/2013/04/clothes-swops-mariella.html 

a donate to your local school box, recycling and trash. Occupy one space in the corner of one room and branch out from there. Be ruthless! 
This is the rule: 
If you haven’t used it in 6 months or if it hasn’t got any long lasting sentimental worth, hand it on to someone else. Also, if clothes are too big for you, either have them taken in, by Monday, or chuck them.

Spring is nature’s way of taking its first big yawn and saying wake up world! Lets do the same!

Green juice for Sore throat ~ Mariella

Oh goodness, when I hear that little voice saying,'Mommy I have a sore throat' my own chest tightens! I know its a game of timing, if we catch early enough, it blows over, if we don't it kinda loiters about for a bit like an unwelcome guest and invites it's buddies, common cold, flu, temperature. 

There is a super winter blues busting tea we drink in the colder months,

http://freshearthorganicfood.blogspot.com/2012/07/my-winter-blues-poa-plan-of-action.html

But juicing the right stuff is like a shot of pure muti right to the spot. Here's a list of what I ferreted out of our garden and why:

~Nasturtium leaves - Yip you can eat the leaves too, and they are very effective at treating sore throat, add young leaves to your winter salad or just nibble on them if you feel a tingle in your throat.
~Peppermint - It tastes nice and it's immune boosting
~Calendula flowers - aids digestion and stimulates immune system
~Broad Leaf Parsley - Packed full of Vit A, B, C and high in iron
~Lavender - Just one little leaf, not more, for Iron, calcium and Vit A
~Bok Choi - Full of Vitamins
~Celery - very alkaline 
~Lettuce - any greens will do but lettuce is full of vitamins 
Then I add Ginger and a whole lemon, just trust me on this, cut the lemon up, and put the entire thing through the juicer, you'll never look back! These two ingredients are great for sore body, better assimilation of nutrients, anti-fever,immune boosting Vit C

The bottom line is that packing your body full of greens when you're sick will help you get better quicker due to their detoxifying and antioxidant properties.
I sugar coat this otherwise thoroughly unpalatable concoction with fresh apple juice and we see the results immediately! One more reason to grow your own!

Why Appletizer is not always my friend and what to do about it! ~ Mariella

I’ve given up on shop juice!

Every box I check has ‘natural flavourant’. 

Its sad…they never used to! 

Appletizer was the only one left, an expensive option, but devoid of additives. And so if we wanted juice in the house, we would get Appletizer. 

Then, suddenly, this new bottle appears, it’s on promo in stores across the country and it’s a little cheaper. So we bought a bottle and checked the ingredients after we got home. Their buzz line is ‘Deliciously Good for me, everyday’ after all, except now its not so good for me anymore, because now, they have included Potassium Sorbate and Pimaricin to their list of Ingredients!

Let me give you a summary of the side effects of these two stow-aways:

Potassium Sorbate

In food: Nausea, vomiting, gastric upset, nutritional deficiency as result of impaired absorption of nutrients in food.

In skin care products: allergic reaction, rashes, extreme irritation when coming into contact with eyes.

The reactions our bodies have to preservatives compound over time, in extreme cases they can lead to renal or kidney problems.

Pimaricin

In medication: Changes in vision, clouding in the cornea, dyspnea (difficult and laboured breathing), chest pain, swelling, pain and discomfort in and around the eye, and increased tearing. Too rapid injection may produce lowering of blood pressure and cardiac syncope (loss of consciousness). Rather inconvenient as it is used in eye treatment!

In food: Aggravates allergies.

The plastic bottle in Question

I am such a fan of Appletizer so I called them and asked about the inclusion of these ingredients. The lady on the other end of the phone was very helpful and had me wait for quite some time while she found out the right answer from the right person. 

She told me that the juice eats/erodes the plastic bottle so they prevent that by adding the preservatives, I asked why they made the changeover to plastic. The Answer? Its cheaper and they have to compete in a financially pressurized economy. Tailor to the masses by making your product as cost effective as possible. I can understand why they've done it. 

And the one way to support them through it is to keep buying their products in glass or call their helpline and explain how much we love their preservative free juice and don’t want to support the plastic bottles!

0800 118 575 Call today and show them you care!

The Journey in search of my lost dog ~ Mariella

I have a dog…or a dog has me, I can never tell! And last week Wednesday he went missing, pinched out of the ether as if he were never there. This is a journal of my week of looking for him and of what I gained through losing him.

                         

Wed 14^th August – It’s Market day and my husband is away so there’s lots of carrying to be done, Rocket, my big black beautiful Weimeraner Dalmation hasn’t come back from his daily run on the hill behind our house, for every hole in the fence we close he digs two and he’s always one step ahead of us! If he does go out he’s usually back in time for breakfast, I fill his bowl and off I go, but it doesn’t feel right.

By 12 o’clock there’s still no sign of him. It’s never happened before. I call the vets and PAWS. No luck. Immediately I think, snare, but everyone tells me to stay positive. In the afternoon I phone a dog whisperer friend, she is incredibly gifted and even though I have done an animal communication course and have done it before to great success, I felt utterly emotional and incompetent. She asked me to send a photograph. I left the market early and called a friend as guys had been sighted on the hill that week and there had been an attack. We went up the hill at 4:30 and started calling. We walked through fynbos where there are no paths, through forests so impenetrable that the Alsatian keeping us company looked at me like I was a crazy woman! My brother-in-law searched all the roads and never ending paths on the hills between us and the location but by sunset we had found nothing. The animal whisperer told me that he was alive, unconcerned, close to home, could see lights, couldn’t move, had tingling in his leg, mentioned left front paw, showed her pine trees stumps and a driveway with a double garage, she explained that he could have passed these places at any time during the day. 

Thursday 15^th –  Early morning I took a drive, followed the sound of a dog barking into a driveway and met the owners on the property I had seen from the hill the evening before. After hearing my story they dropped everything and took me on a two hour drive over the hills in their 4x4 to look for him. 

I learnt much about neighbourliness that day, about the concern and care that 'strangers' show when your plight is one of the heart, a missing animal. If I wasn’t so worried I’d have enjoyed the drive. It was so beautiful! Undulating brush bursting with yellow flowers and open fields with grazing cows, paths crisscrossing like a spider’s web, little dams everywhere. I called until I couldn’t call anymore. In the book I’m reading a lead character says,’ If you say something enough times, it loses it’s meaning’. My dog’s name became the only sound that left my lips, the only thing I knew how to say. I wasn’t beside myself, hadn’t shed a tear, I was bush woman and I was going to find my dog! We found nothing. I spent the rainy afternoon in the bushes in a rain suit ignoring the feeling that I shouldn’t be out there alone but I had turned into She-Rambo! Explorer and Dog finder extraordinaire, only slightly terrified of possible baddies and armed with a panga, not my weapon of choice but useful in fynbos! I found nothing. A friend told me about poacher-finding trackers and I booked them for Saturday.

Friday 16^th – It was getting tough, my animal whispering friend said Rocket hadn’t moved and was a little thirsty, people started telling me I should assume he’d been taken and that he’d found a good home. My mind was a mess but I still hadn’t shed a tear, resolute, life without him felt strange, as if some creature had ripped the fabric of time and snatched him through the hole, like he was just just on the other side of a thin curtain and all I had to do was reach out and he’d be there. I put posters everywhere because perhaps they were right, perhaps he’d been taken, a guy friend offered to chaperon me in my searching of our forest. 

I can now describe in detail, the vast array of thorns in our forest, the ones that hook, gouge, suspend you mid-barb-wire-fence-climb, like washing on a line! The Alsatian looking at me all the while, evidently wondering why I wasn’t crawling, I tried, there were more thorns on the ground!

It was about Friday that I started to feel changes within myself, that what Rocket had taken from me when he’d run into my knee almost a year earlier, he was giving back. I was told I needed an operation, but I don’t do operations! So I went to a kinesiologist instead and healed fast in some ways and slow in others! I felt a little unable, but after days of jumping, climbing, crawling and covering ground I felt stronger than I had when I injured my knee, he’d forced me to move and challenge myself, to creep through thorny gaps a little smaller than myself and for the first time I really had a clear picture of where I live, where the marsh begins and ends, especially where it ends, with a splash, the dams, cow trails, buck trails, fence lines, forest gullies, open paddocks, whose cows were whose, which neighbour’s dogs had killed which neighbour’s chickens. I received so much love and support, people I‘d never even met asking after him, neighbours phoning to find out the latest. My friend had spoken with him but had no more information to share and said that she has been way off in the past. It was hard. The thought of him dying out there because I hadn’t done right by him plagued me.

Saturday 17^th – I was tired. I’d had enough of the bush, picking thorns out of shins and hands and hair, the scratchy wilderness and a name sounding over and over. I left the trackers, all three of them and a sniffer dog to do what they do best. They came back at the end of the day, disappointed at not having picked up his scent, it seems the rain had washed every trace of him away, but there were no snares they said, which was reassuring. But being as thorough as they were meant they hadn’t covered the entire area and there was nothing more to be done as the trail had gone cold. It rained again that night.

Sunday 18^th – Still no sign, I searched more areas with no success. But I had woken up with the strong feeling that he wasn’t stolen, he was up there and in need. I journalled that night. Forgot about the ‘how’ and focused on the result I wanted, focused on holding him, hugging him, the feeling of his thick black fur under my hands, him in his bed, happy and home, I wrote, ‘you are coming home Rocket, you will be here by the full moon’ I left the wondering behind, I chose instead to remember something I’d read about the number 11 in numerology, my number, that we are the most intuitive and when we focus our minds on it, we can achieve anything, I used that as my inspiration. He’s coming home before full moon. My friend said, keep talking to him, he can hear you, it’s giving him strength.

Monday 19^th – I had a full day of work and couldn't search but felt strongly that he was on the hill. Feeling a fool for wasting time on posters, I hired Happy, a guy who has worked for us in the past for Tuesday morning. I felt a pull to a certain area, my heart was leading the way instead of my head,a place I’d walked past too many times but when dogs are trapped they won’t call out, not even to you, because instinctively they feel threatened and vulnerable. My friend, the whisperer said she had a vision of him floating above the Bitou river, she didn’t say that it was him showing her he was giving up, she knew that I needed to stay positive. I wrote in my journal that he will come home before the full moon.Tomorrow! 

Tueday 20^th – We climbed the hill at 10:00. I tried to communicate with him and for the first time, it was clear as a bell, no weird images of him in turmoil, writhing like a snake until I opened my eyes in despair. He was clear, his eyes looking at me. I said to him, today you are coming home, I am going to call you, if you can hear me, you call back, I am finding you and bringing you home, to your family, your bed, your food, aren’t you hungry? Come home, I screamed in my mind. I opened my eyes and called him. I heard something, like a seagull being strangled! I called again, heard it again but softer. I ran. Ran up the path, felt the worlds of unknowing between us slipping away. I found nothing at the top of the path. I phoned my animal whispering friend, asked her if she could confirm that it was him, but she was driving (as luck would have it!) but said I should just keep telling him to let himself be heard. We walked up and down that small area for four hours and stopped for lunch. I explained to Happy that I wanted him to search a specific area, close to home, while I collected my son from school. Don’t go far I said, stay in this area and call me if you find him. Five minutes from home I got a call. It was Happy. He was screaming into the phone in his lyrical broken English, I find him, I find that one! But his leg is not right. Can you carry him? I asked, turning around. I saw his tail wagging from beyond the fence. A snare wrapped so tight around his paw it had cut into his flesh, causing it to swell to more than double the size, but his wagging tail and his relieved eyes made me give up the tears that hadn't come all week. I could hardly see the steering wheel as we drove down the drive way to the vet. We had found him! 

 

The snare was removed under mild sedation and after 1 litre of water and three suppers, he went to sleep by the heater. A deep sleep. No dreams. His thin frame lifting and falling slightly with each breath. He was home.

I phoned everyone, my guy friend who’d done much of the searching with me said, Ah my faith is restored! And he was spot on, it was Rocket's left front paw, he was close to home, close to cut pines, he could see the lights.

I cannot advocate doing an animal communication course enough, find one in your area, it's an enriching ability to foster and useful. When I phoned the animal whisperer she said, he had given up and if I had given up he wouldn't have made it. It rained on Wednesday night, an icy deluge that flooded the paths and hillside, but it didn’t bother us, in our home next to the heater for full moon had passed.