Once I had the beds I wanted dug into the ground, I stated making planting boxes, yes, with pallets. My small “greenhouse” box was for planting seeds pallet and shade clothe. Then a big shade clothe box I planned, and did, plant Strawberries in, with the rock wall for the fruit to lie on. You know why they are called STRAWberries don’t you? If the fruit lies on the ground it goes vrot, so the traditional way is to put straw down under the fruit. Rock wall worked just as well!
My first tomatoes came up while I was busy with all this and had one lonely chilli . The tomato seed were from France, the artist here have a commune that side, and one brought seeds. Then for fun, grew purple cauliflowers.
As the place where I am is up for sale…Gypsy on the Move?
As explained in the link above, I will post, a series of what would be my OLD MAN’s CV.
This is a garden I started from scratch at an Artist’s Studio, Zwavelpoort, Pretoria East. As you see it was just a piece of Veld. As usual I did not have anyone help me, each spade of sand, each rock I carried myself. The photos in the ensuing series…
As the place where I am is up for sale…Gypsy on the Move?
As explained in the link above, I will post, a series of what would be my OLD MAN’s CV.As the place where I am is up for sale…Gypsy on the Move?
The Kitchen area of the Bottle Cottage.
Never even tried to do tiling before this. But. Had a whole lot of broken tiles and a cast away metal cupboard. While the two row of bottles was drying I attempted to make a work surface and table for the little gas stove. Was a bit messy in the beginning but got it right I think? At this time I was also growing vegetables with great difficulty as here in the foothills of Uitkyk one has a cm of top soil, if you are lucky. There were a few horse ranches near and that made it possible to make some topsoil. Oh. And Cucumbers? Can grow then in pure horse manure.
Back to the building. At this stage I had an idea of making Bottle Bricks. I had the size worked out for easy building, one man size. Thing was I had only a few ideas that needed to me tested. The first attempts were not good as you see in the photo. To make a mould strong enough to hold poured concrete was a problem. Then that the necks of the bottles stuck out was no good. My internet research is easier now, back then I did not use it at all. Trail and Error. As we go along you shall see what the final result was. And I shall attempt at giving a “building plans for Bottle Bricks” . The other problem was balancing the bottles on their necks, as this was the best results.
The beginning of the drive was amazing. The feeling of riding to war, not knowing where we were or what to expect, and the strange scenery, all added to the feeling of surrealism.
The road north was a single, semi-tarred affair with trucks cannibalised where they had broken down. Outside of Caba Ledo was a huge base of special ops soldiers. They had red berets with a baltjie of a leopard’s face. They looked exceptionally tough and mean; a mixture of blacks and coloureds and not a white face to be seen. There was another African market with plenty of dried fish and meat hanging in the hot sun; the smell of a fishing village’s market is unique — thank goodness. Past the village the semi-desert vegetation was as strange as it was beautiful. The tallest cacti I have ever seen before or since grow along this coastal belt, interspersed with huge baobab trees. It was an almost alien landscape. The grass was sparse and, in between, the sand I remembered so well from my Border trips. So, on we drove. At the time we did not know it, but we were to travel about 200 km north towards Luanda, the capital. At one point we came to a bridge that had been blown up. The road had been rebuilt in the then-dry gully. That road would not survive the first rains. The first white people we saw were the road builders that seemed to be Portuguese descendants. Right then my plan for escape and evasion, if necessary, materialised. A deaf-mute Porra road workman should do nicely! It got dark very quickly and we didn’t see any other traffic, again for obvious reasons: not much movement after dark in operational areas.
As the place where I am is up for sale…Gypsy on the Move?
As explained in the link above, I will post, a series of what would be my OLD MAN’s CV.
This is a garden I started from scratch at an Artist’s Studio, Zwavelpoort, Pretoria East. As you see it was just a piece of Veld. As usual I did not have anyone help me, each spade of sand, each rock I carried myself. The photos in the ensuing series…
After getting a few beds well prepped I start planting a few things. Radish are the best for a quick crop. Then depending on the season a few other veggies that are “in season” Usually I plant from seed that I get out… the dustbin of where I am. People throw away a lot of food and even more seeds. My next mission is to get the kitchen staff to trow all veggie cuttings and peels in a container. Potato peels I found to be no good. Too much starch .. I think.
And as I said a Veggie Garden does not have to be ugly, or even untidy. Those pots with succulents? Waste from the Artist Bronze Foundry, crucibles for melting metal that are burned out. Heavy and durable. Then I am always glad to see little animals like Geckos in my gardens. They also eat Goggas, as I do not use ANY poisons , insects are a concern. But there are ways to deal with that, and the wild animals that raided her, monkey and Duiker were the problem with larger animals. The biggest problem was with Blowfly and any Squash type veggies. I found out , years later, that the Blowfly are invader species mainly, spoke to a conservation guy in St Lucia, he was hanging up traps, similar to one that a Gardening Club sent me here! Did not work! But. As we go along I will tell you what I did and how my crop was just too much for the place. I was eventually swapping veggies for biltong with a neighbor. Now that was a good trade!!!!
As the place where I am is up for sale…Gypsy on the Move?
As explained in the link above, I will post, a series of what would be my OLD MAN’s CV.
The Bottle Cottage
Thought we could take a look at the PALLETS part of this building today.
When collection bottles in Nelspruit I saw at the Glass place, they had pallets for free. Then big bins of glass off cuts. I can use this!
Long ago I met a chap that made Damp Proofing with Polystyrene, as you may well know that stuff is terrible for the ecology, just does NOT break down and go away. Recycling for something to become yet another piece of junk to be tossed in a landfill is…. Moronic. By dissolving Polystyrene into a chemical called Xylene until is get you get a thick liquid, that you then “paint” onto your problem wall. The , I called it Polyxylene here, is basically liquid plastic, when applied it soaks into the wall and sets in a very thin plastic … sheet? Inside the wall. Ok. I would need that but thought about what I had on hand. Pallets, glass and Polyxylene.
Now if I dissolved enough Polystyrene I could make a thick glue. Then use the big off cuts to put in the gaps of the pallets. Used silicone to attach the glass, coated that with thick Polyxylene, cruche different coloured glass into small pieces and glued them on. The thick Polyxylene takes a long time to dry, two days even in the hot Bushveld. But. Had other ideas for the Pallet Panels.
In the shed at VeloGecko was a lot of Roof Waterproofing cans of paint and those strips of clothe one puts down then paints over. This would protect the rather poor wood pallets are made of. As you see by the photos I did a few variations of these ideas, and the end result…….
Any donations to keep the wolf at bay till I find work will be appreciated GREATLY!
As the place where I am is up for sale…Gypsy on the Move?
As explained in the link above, I will post, a series of what would be my OLD MAN’s CV.
The Bottle Cottage.
I arrived at VeloGecko campsite in order to make.. Veggie Gardens. But. On the property was the , basically, frame of a BOTTLE COTTAGE! The owners had put the floor, the stonework and the roof up, then half of the front wall and two rows of bottles all round. Then got tired of it. One look at thiis and my Recycling Maniac brain went crazy! Here we had no electricity, one small generator and some solar panels. I had my own small solar set up in the caravan I stayed in.
Again I worked mainly by myself, now and then the lady of the place would come…. help. There was a mountain of bottles that had been collected and we collected at the bars, sports clubs etc. on Mondays. The river sand I collected from the run off of the sand road, you see the pic of the dog jumping? That was the sand supply. I build with bottles, one by one, but saw there were a few problems with this. One could build two rows at a time only or the wall would collapse, I started experimenting with what became my Bottle Brick (photos and how to make later.) At the same time I started using all sorts of “rubbish” like pallets, re-invented my Polyxylene to make think glue and all sorts of things.
As the place where I am is up for sale…Gypsy on the Move?
As explained in the link above, I will post, a series of what would be my OLD MAN’s CV.
This is a garden I started from scratch at an Artist’s Studio, Zwavelpoort, Pretoria East. As you see it was just a piece of Veld. As usual I did not have anyone help me, each spade of sand, each rock I carried myself. The photos in the ensuing series…
Learned over the years, not only with planning a garden, but just about anything one does, the preparation is the most important, if somewhat boring thing you can do for success. First was to dig the Veld grass out, I do NOT use poisons in my gardens. Then try get the most natural fertilizer, There were no cow or horse farms nearby, as manure is my first choice. Hell, at Mabula Game Lodge I collected some nice “exotic” poop. Rhino, Elephant and Buffalo. Worked well enough.
This takes time, first the manual labour, was up at first light and worked till dusk for weeks, planting as I went along. And. Who says a Veggie Garden has to be ugly????
After chow we got on the vehicles on top of all the kit. The driver and his mate were armed with AKs. We went sightseeing, saw a sign that said Restaurante and decided to go get something to drink. The restaurant was closed. It was a small building with quite a few bullet holes in the walls. Some of the windows were boarded up. Glass windows were rare in Angola. Their vegetation was sparse consisted mostly of the thick-leafed type of plant you find along wind-swept coasts. Just past the building was a huge sandstone cliff with the ocean crashing down below. It was like a scene from a movie. We had no time to get down to the beach. On the way back we saw some small informal markets; at that time there were none of these back in South Africa. They looked precisely the same as the ones you now find in the New South Africa: terrible. Sticks held together with string or strips of plastic, and roofs made of rusty pieces of tin. Raw chunks of meat hung from wire attached to the roof, alongside dried salted fish. I had never seen dried fish of this size before, only the tiny kapenta fish in Zimbabwe, but the smell and the flies made the idea of eating any of this lot somewhat repulsive. The fish had been cleaned next to the stall and a few months’ worth of innards just lay there rotting in the sun. This was our first glimpse of how unhygienic this country was. Our delicate city noses could not take much of this and we did not linger very long. We had been told a vehicle would take us to the training camp later in the afternoon, so we headed back to the airbase. It turned out that it was the same vehicle we were on and the kit underneath us was actually for us.
We had instructions not to drink the water out of the taps; after my stint in the SADF I could not believe how dirty the showers and toilets were, and would not have wanted to drink from those taps anyway. Having been a civilian for the past 10 years had made me squeamish. I would soon be cured! We found a storeroom ourselves, with 5-litre bottles of water with Portuguese labels. As I have mentioned, no-one went out of their way to be helpful. The military being what it is, everyone has to have an image; perhaps this is to fool oneself about how dangerous the situation really is. We got a decent chow and a few beers at about 3 o’clock. Up till then it was warm bottled water. We were lent plates and pikstels but the kak-sleg store-man wanted them back.
Later when I went on my first Pass, flew out of Caba Ledo, and it then looked like an old SADF camp. Clean!
Pikstel is a set , knife, fork , spoon. Kak-sleg is Shit- bad.
Spring. Time of change, a good time and good changes. Well I HAVE to believe that right now. Last Sunday I was informed that GOA is going on the market and I must find alternative arrangements, for work and to stay. I know EXACTLY what I want to do with the last few years of my life, and to that end I am attempting to make a decent CV. I want to get out of been so much cyberspace firstly. Then I NEED to grow stuff and make gardens like at Zwavelpoort. I also would like to build real things with wood, not make photos of things, make some. I did put some feelers out and will start this week looking at these “organic” farms. Hope to find one in the Bush here, where I belong. Also an extra pair of …. trained eyes about the place will help with security. Well, wish me luck….
Will get my photos of all the gardens I have made over the years, from Maputo to Cape Town!!!
The Mexican Horse Thief 