Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2019 från go! Platteland

BOOK NOW! BREAD BASICS Learn the essentials of sourdough, yeast, bread baking, and why Eureka Mills’s stone-ground flour is a healthier option. Course participants will be baking a low-hydration sourdough farm bread and a high-hydration ciabatta with yeast. MACHADODORP | Saturday, 5 October 2019 at Millys of Machado farm stall and restaurant, on the N4 PAARL | Saturday, 19 October 2019 at Mynhardt Joubert’s Station Street Kitchen HARTBEESPOORT | Saturday, 9 November 2019 at Meerhof Lodge FERMENTED FOODS AND SALT BLENDS Discover why it’s important to supplement the probiotics in your digestive system and learn more about how fermented foods like kefir and kombucha can help. Course participants will be making a sauerkraut salad and apple vinegar, and will receive a flask with a scoby to complete the process at…

The R384 runs west from Britstown, straight as an arrow. On both sides of the road, the Bo-Karoo lies flat on its back. As far as the eye can see, it’s just drab brush, except for the odd image of a springbok quivering in the heat. It’s dry. The small patches of green that have sprung up after a brief burst of rain don’t make much of a difference. The fattest sheep you’ll see around here is that symbol of the animal on a triangular warning sign. This stretch of land is for Karoo connoisseurs only. The die-hard fans. A stand of green pine trees and the white church steeple draw the eye from afar. As you get closer, a green sign welcomes you to Vosburg and its shady trees.…

Sadiola Farm lies 20 km outside Mbombela, nestled in-between rocky outcrops, on the Uitkyk Road towards Malelane. Sadiola is also the name of the gold mine where An Smeesters and Hennie le Roux met 15 years ago – she, from Belgium, was an exploration geologist and he, a South African, the mine manager. Today, their dairy-goat farm is the biggest business of its kind in the Lowveld – an area not particularly known for this trade or for making cheese. With 120 goats, 24 geese, three dogs, three cats and a parrot on only 26 hectares, the couple are finally fulfilling their dream of putting down roots as small-scale farmers. Hennie comes from a farming background – all of his uncles were farmers and one of his aunts raised goats…

Not long after leaving Windhoek, the capital – and only city – of Namibia, the road changes from tarmac to gravel. That is, if you are taking the scenic route. As soon as you need to turn up your radio to hear anything above the white noise of the wheels on the gravel, you know the ultimate road trip to the oldest desert in the world has begun. Destination: The Desert Grace in Gondwana Namib Park. One moment you are still admiring the nothingness – food for the soul in an overcrowded world where so many things compete for our attention. The next moment, you go around a bend on Spreetshoogte Pass on the C26 and you are blown away by the most beautiful views. Continue straight on to the…

It sounds like a dream job to be surrounded by flowers day in and day out. Dahlias, ranunculi and anemones. Delphiniums, cock’s combs, lace flowers, cornflowers, cosmos, hydrangeas, snapdragons, Iceland poppies. Foxgloves, carnations, phlox, stocks, zinnias, nigella… Adene Nieuwoudt nods, laughing. “Jaaaa, that’s the kind of romantic idea I had in my head once upon a time,” she says, sitting at the kitchen table on the Nieuwoudt fruit farm, Platvlei, where her husband, Andrew, and his brother, Guy, farm with pears, plums and citrus. “I am crazy about my work and it is a privilege to have so much beauty around me, but it’s not all moonshine and roses. Working with flowers is much harder and more labour-intensive than fruit – and believe me, that’s not just me feeling sorry…

Walking out into your garden and returning with fresh cut flowers is one of life’s simplest and most pure pleasures. Have you ever noticed that a room without blooms – or something living and green – seems lifeless? Graced with living flowers, it breathes again. Even a few spring pansies or summer nasturtiums in an egg cup will make life seem better. Every season has its particular floral markers, and with a little planning it is possible to watch the passage of time by noticing and enjoying what is in bloom right outside your door. The three secrets 1 DIVERSITY If there is a secret to a garden that overflows with flowers for most of the year, it is diversity. (This may be a life secret, too!) Plant with imagination,…

The discovery of plastic changed the way we live in ways that few other discoveries have done. And here is the big surprise: plastic has improved our lives and made the world a better place. What, you are probably wondering, has Platteland lost its marbles? Just take a look around you. Plastic is all around, in perfect, harmless form. You find it in everything from syringes and computers to cellphones and electric appliances. Toys, jewellery, lamps, pot handles, Teflon, isolation for electric cables. Shoes and clothes, dental floss, elastic waistbands, pantyhose, air bags, hothouses, garden hoses. The puffer jackets that are so trendy these days. And also in vehicles and aircraft, making them lighter on fuel, reducing pollution. And we haven’t even started talking about the medical industry. Life without…

1 Wash your recyclables – plates, milk bottles, cooldrink bottles and so on are usually discarded by recycling bodies if they have food or anything sticky on them. It’s just good manners. But be conservative when using water – a peanut-butter jar, for instance, is best cleaned with a spatula… 2 Your disposable coffee cup cannot be recycled because the cardboard is lined with a layer of plastic to make it waterproof. And the lids also made of low-grade plastic and cannot be recycled. 3 Toothbrushes and toothpaste tubes both consist of various materials: tubes contain aluminium on the inside and plastic on the outside, whereas toothbrushes usually have soft bristles with a hard plastic handle. 4 The containers in which fruit and vegetables are packed – as well as…

Near Sentrum, Limpopo Willem Frost’s wife Lorraine apologises for her sewing machine still being on the table. But it is a kitchen table, after all, and a proper kitchen table is good for anything under the sun. The Frosts’ farm is remote. Matlabas Game Lodge is about 100 km north of Thabazimbi and 80 km west of Lephalale. If you’re travelling from Thabazimbi – along a teeth-jarring road – the nearest recognisable dot on the map is Sentrum, nowadays reduced to sun-baked livestock-auction pens. We’re sitting at the table, Willem across from me and Dominee Hein Enslin to his left. It is a Saturday afternoon, and behind Willem, through the curtains, you can see the sun setting. Tomorrow morning Hein has to lead two church services – he is a…

With the Spice Garden the farm has come full circle: first, it tells the story of the Europeans who, in the centuries before fridges existed, sailed their ships around the Cape to buy spices in the East. (They really needed to do something to mask the smell of meat and fish which they could only preserve by salt-curing.) Owing to a vitamin C deficiency after months at sea, the spice seekers usually suffered from scurvy, resulting in the Dutch East India Company sending Jan van Riebeeck to start a refreshment station with a large vegetable garden at the Cape. That garden was the inspiration behind Babylonstoren’s majestic fruit-and-vegetable garden that takes your breath away every season. In the Spice Garden – under a white dome with a polycarbonate roof and…

When hunger pangs hit on the open road, a farm stall is always Platteland’s first choice to stop for a snack, especially when it’s in the middle of nowhere, like The Apple Crate Farmstall at the junction of the R62 and N9 outside Avontuur. According the current owner, Cindi Rosslee, the shop used to sell fresh fruit – apples, pears and oranges from the Langkloof – but then it closed down, until Cindi took over and renovated it. Besides fresh seasonal fruit from the valley, you’ll now find preserves (jams, chutneys, olives, olive oils and curried beans), biscuits and rusks, handmade soaps and bottles of pomegranate, honeybush and apple cordials. And don’t leave without some of Matthew Zondagh’s Kloof Craft apple concentrate (see page 20). Just add soda water and…

Janet and Edward Oberholster Retirees Sitting at Die Ketel coffee shop, you don’t expect to have a conversation with two Vosburg residents in English. “We’ve been living here since 2000 and I still can’t speak Afrikaans,” says Janet. “I know the basics like, ‘Daar is niks’ or, ‘Vat dit.’ I do at least understand it a bit better now. I always tell people, ‘Talk to me small.’” Chatting to Janet and her husband, Edward, who were both raised in Zimbabwe, will probably be the only English you’ll hear in Vosburg. When they were still living in Port Elizabeth, they would sometimes visit Edward’s family in Vosburg – and that’s how they came to know the town. “We started thinking we’d love to live here,” says Janet. “And, I have to…

Anne Greenwell Co-owner of Book League Anne, who has lived in Darling for the past 13 years with her life partner, Wendy – who is also her business partner and “does the books” at their bookshop – says she wanted to study agriculture. “In those years, any woman who wanted to further her studies had to become a teacher, and that was that. And that’s how, in 1963, I left the former Rhodesia and moved to the Cape to become a teacher at Golden Grove Primary School in Rondebosch.” Anne battled for eight years to organise a library at the school – “as always, the darned rugby fields, netball courts and cricket pitches were given priority.” After 14 years, she started working at an independent bookstore, and then became a…

Eksteenfontein is not on any major route. You might not even spot it on a map. It’s a place hidden deep in the Richtersveld, clasped in a calloused grip of mountains. Even clouds battle to reach it. It has been six years since the last decent rains, says Selma Klim, standing in front of Eksteenfontein’s 100 pale-blue postboxes. “But we do at least get our post once every three weeks.” At Elbry Strauss’s Welkom-winkel you’ll find fresh bread, vegetables and fruit every Tuesday morning – on Mondays he rattles along a corrugated road to Springbok and back in his bakkie to buy supplies. Elbry wasn’t always in retail. Like many of the Richterveld’s people he used to work at the Alexkor mine, and like many others he lost his job…

More than once, please Avoid cheap plastic products that are used just once and only briefly. The biggest culprits are shopping bags, straws, disposable coffee cups (and their lids) and cotton buds. Sandwiches Foil is a better way to pack your lunch than cling film, but a good plastic lunchbox is the best because you reuse it. Get clingy There are a number of businesses making a substitute for cling film using a mixture of cotton, beeswax and tree gum. See page 142 for more on the beautiful product that Catherine Momberg of Sunshine Wraps sells at the Bathurst market. In Platteland #21 (Summer 2018/19), we spoke to Lulu Edy-Roderick from LuluBee. You can buy products from both of them online. (And, we have read, you can also twist them…

Some announce their arrival with the clinking of shopping bags full of empty glass bottles and jars in which they’d bought the previous week’s pineapple beer or preserve or chutney; others come in quietly with a wallet and an empty egg carton under one arm, or call, “Morning, Flag Lady!” in the direction of Barbara Main, who is busy stringing bunting among the trees in Sandy and Brian Thomas’s garden. “Yes, here in Bathurst people recycle,” says Sasolburg native Elmarie Ward, who took part in the second season of the baking-competition show Koekedoor on kykNET. She told Platteland via Facebook about this small but very lively little market in her new home town. At Elmarie’s stand, a large plastic tub was already brimful of ice and bottles of pineapple beer…

About eight years ago, my wife, Vida, and I decided to swap the city life for the farm. I worked in retail and she was a ballet teacher. Then we took a big risk by buying a farm – an uncultivated open piece of land. We had to do everything from scratch – there wasn’t even a road. We built the road, a house, a stable. (My daughter does horse riding and is the South African showjumping champion. She taught a pony someone had given her for free, worked very hard and then won at the SA Championships. She is currently studying veterinary science.) Our son is in Grade 8 – when we moved to the farm, we started home-schooling the kids. Today, we enjoy our small organic farming concern.…

Do, browse and buy There are only two small shops in Vosburg where you’ll find something to eat: Ricks Karoo Winkel and the coffee shop Die Ketel. Don’t expect cappuccinos – but Ricks does serve coffee with condensed milk. You’ll find an assortment of hand-made items at both shops, and Die Ketel sells home-baked treats and Karoo meat. They are open until 17:00 on weekdays and until 13:00 on Saturdays, and are closed on Sundays. Ricks Karoo Winkel 📞 082 560 8058 Die Ketel 📞 072 997 3182 Stay over Vossie Nes In the lounge are photos of this cottage in a dilapidated state, taken a few years ago. It has been beautifully renovated and is now an excellent overnight spot for four people. There’s a sheltered braai area. vossie-nes.co.za…

We regularly see, hear and read about the once beautiful pearls of the platteland that are now “going to the dogs”, places where municipal services are collapsing. Sure, in many cases this is no exaggeration, but how often do we consider the opposite side of the coin? How is it that some towns manage to remain clean and tidy? Why are visitors to some villages compelled to snap up a derelict house, fix it up and move in? Why do the residents of some towns come together to do something constructive about the challenges they face rather than snapping at one another, or complaining morning, noon and night about the incompetence or laziness of municipal officials? DARLING A change of heart It was on 27 April 1995 that satirist Pieter-Dirk…

DO, WANDER AND SHOP Laugh (and eat) at Evita se Perron Visiting Darling without taking in a show at Evita se Perron is like visiting Paris for the first time and not going to the Eiffel Tower. See the website for the programme and to book. Arcadia Street. evita.co.za 📧 bookings@evita.co.za 📞 022 492 2831 Taste award-winning wines! Sip some of the area’s most celebrated wines at Ormonde (📞 022 492 3540) in Mount Pleasant Street on the edge of town, or a stone’s throw away at Groote Post (📞 022 492 2825), Cloof (📞 022 492 2839) or Darling Cellars (📞 022 492 2276). And if you don’t have much time, you can always pop in at The Darling Wine Shop ( darlingwine.co.za 📞 022 492 3971) in Main…

Few agricultural areas in the country can beat the Overberg in the Western Cape after winter has shed its rains. This wide strip of fertile soil stretches from the Hottentots Holland Mountains in the west to the Breede River in the east, with the Riviersonderend Mountains and the coast at Cape Agulhas forming the northern and southern flanks, respectively. Throughout the year, as the world opens up around you while travelling on the N2, you are suddenly greeted between Caledon and Swellendam by rolling hills with fields of wheat, barley, oats and canola. As far as the eye can see. But it is in late winter and early spring that this region puts on its most extravagant coat: when the canola fields bloom bright yellow. This spectacle draws thousands of…

Ginger (Zingiber officinale), turmeric (Curcuma longa) and cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum) are native to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, and belong to the same tropical plant family, Zingiberaceae. But, because they fall into different genuses, they differ completely in taste and appearance. Turmeric, a powerful antioxidant with anti-inflammatory properties, has been used for centuries in the Indian and Chinese cultures to treat, among others, cancer, dementia, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, allergies, irritable bowel syndrome and cystic fibrosis. Research shows it can also reduce cholesterol levels and improve cardiovascular and liver function. Ginger, on the other hand, is used to deal with indigestion, wind, nausea, morning and motion sickness, diarrhoea, headaches, sore throats, coughs, heart palpitations, colic and lack of appetite. The good news is that you can easily grow this exotic…

I am crazy about chickens, I have to admit – whether it’s a snow-white Leghorn, a Rhode Island Red, a Naked Neck or any mixed-breed farmyard chicken. Even as a youngster in the city I saw myself as a farm boy. In Durban, where I grew up, I had a red hen. She roamed free and laid an egg for me every day. I faithfully closed her coop every night. But after she was killed by a dog and the subsequent flood of tears, I decided never again. From that moment on, I’d be content with the chickens in my maternal grandfather’s yard. This yard was on a farm in the Dwarsrivier Valley near Ladismith in the Little Karoo. We travelled there by train every December until Oupa Jan Horn,…