26 October 2020
This month has flown by! I now understand a farmer's rush to get out there and harvest while the sun shines! We have pretty much blinked and our peach harvest is all but done. The fruits that remain on the trees have been shared with the birds and insects, and are really only fit to be carefully diced into cubes for chutneys and peach jam. Celia (Mombles) has mastered the jam craft to produce a few sample jars of peachy jam and it's taking all our self control to not gobble the lot before we get it out to our customers!
As we adapt to a "new normal," Baker Byron is back at his day job more and more. This has seen him passing the baton (rolling pin) to myself, Celia and Marijke. Having less time on our hands and more flour, we've expanded the family operation to include a really awesome human, Kirsty. Byron's cousin and my spirit animal, the awesome social media posts you've been seeing has all been thanks to this Insta wizard. We love having Kirsty on our team and we're secretly hoping that she gets sucked into our Rooted Herbivores adventure on a permanent basis.
As a child (okay yes, as an adult too) I always had this phobia of Christmas beetles. You guys know the ones, little brown winged beasts, who have even a worse sense of direction than me (ask my family, folks, that's pretty hard to achieve!) and repeatedly bump into the same solid surface, especially when you're trying to sleep on a hot summer's night. I have this scenario pictured where one day, a beetley beastie manages to find it's target while I'm sleeping, creep into my ear canal, use it's tiny little pointy leg as a scalpel, carve itself a doorway into my tympanic membrane and hang little framed portraits of it's family members in its new home in my middle ear. That's the very definition of a phobia, not very logical I know, but I still fear it! In recent years, I've begun to notice that I've hardly had to worry about unwanted beetle tenants, as the insect population has seriously dwindled. As a kid, we used to go on a weekend break to a game reserve in the summer and the ceiling fan that was on during the hot night would leave the floor littered with carcasses of Christmas beetles who missed my ear drum and flew into the spinning blades instead. A trip to the same game reserve last year yielded no such massacre. While I was thrilled for my ears, I'm kind of horrified to actually be witnessing a perceivable environmental disaster, within my lifetime (and I'm not even THAT old).
In my home garden, it's been a seven year process of gradually ditching the ornamentals that aren't edible, and replacing with veggies, or indigenous flora. Avoiding pesticides and interplanting with beneficial plants has seen the insect population boom! This has attracted the insect eaters and I now host a lounge of lizards (I just googled it, that's totally the collective noun for lizards!) and a colony of frogs. This has attracted birds who like to snack on these guys and there's a flourishing little ecosystem going on in my backyard. I'm having to do some serious brain training because the Christmas beetles have returned as well! My eco-warrior personality is thrilled, but the phobic side of me still lets out a squeal or two when the dreaded beetle tap-tap-taps against the wall right above my bed!
Having recently watched David Attenborough's A Life on our Planet (do yourselves a favour and watch this incredible summary of his observations over his lifetime), I so appreciate the richness in diversity that is slowly creeping back into my garden. As humans, we like to box things up and categorise neatly, because our understanding of the intricate interconnectedness in nature is so limited. We see a termite nest and we reach for the poison. Problem solved, no? No. Because the termite goes down into the nest with that poisoned body and the rain falls and the groundwater gets tainted. And the soil in the surrounding area absorbs that poison. And the plants growing in that region absorb the poison via their root systems. And the animals that eat the plants (people too) end up with toxins in their bodies. It may not be visible immediately, but toxin build-up all adds up and all kinds of health problems begin to manifest. Frogs eat poisoned termites and owls eat the poisoned frogs. We wipe out whole food chains with our "simple" solutions to complex problems. We're hasty to solve a problem straight away instead of looking at the ecosystem as a whole. Why is there a termite infestation? What can we change in the environment to make the booming population a little less comfortable? Less termite snacks lying around? Creating an inviting home for more natural predators? Use of organic pesticide? The best way for the environment is often the hard way, and the slow way. And in our human craving for instant gratification, we pay the price in the long run.
Having spent most of my weekend getting our gorgeous products ready for a market this weekend (details to follow), the slow way, I'm reminded again why we do what we do. Supporting us means supporting hand peeled pecan nuts (Marijke and Andrew have the blisters to prove it), growing our own veg and watering from a rain tank (because municipal water would be quicker and have better water pressure, but it costs the environment more to clean it to make it fit for human consumption, so why spray it over our spinaches?), baking bread using stone-milled flour, buying products packaged in reusable, recyclable or compostable materials. We've done the research. We've taken the time. The hard, slow way. Because it's worth it. For me and for the next generation. I want Arienne to have a chance to develop a beetle phobia too. I want her to know what a shongololo looks like. I want her to see a glow worm, in our garden, not on Youtube.
So how can you make a difference? Support local. Know where your goods come from. Demand better from suppliers. Come along and get your goodies from us at the market in Kloofsig, Pretoria, this Saturday (31 October) between 8:00 and 12:00 at the corner of Smuts Avenue and Solomon crescent. We'll also have a stall at the Vegan Food Fair at Loftus Park in Pretoria on 8 November. We're also available for our regular orders for pick up in Lyttelton or delivery within our delivery area. Our Joburg supporters will be pleased to know that we will be doing a Fourways, Woodmead area delivery run on Thursday, so be sure to get your orders in by tomorrow! Please see attached pricelist for our latest seasonal offerings.
On leave from my own day job this week, I will be knee deep in the garden, manufacturing organic doggy treats, lemon preserve, harvesting and preserving peach leftovers, stamping brown bags with beetroot ink, and so on and so forth.
Please see attached our most recent price list for easy reference, and apologies in advance if it makes your tummy rumble!
Hope to see you all soon!
Claire
Beetle-phobe
Pesticide hater
Newly-appointed baker