The heat of the moment

October brought unfamiliar hot days. Reaching temperatures that are more befitting of mid-summer than mid-spring. The garden seems to love it. Everything seems lush and green. Unfortunately, the roses did not really like the fresh horse manure. We have to brush up on the best chemical composition of the soil in the rosarium to help bring them back to their happy selves.

The orchard has turned from a landscape resembling a work by Monet, to something that Van Gogh would have painted. The oak trees are responding very well to all the treatment they received. They are looking fresh with healthy green foliage. Trimming the lower branches off the large oak created a new ‘room’ where we can enjoy lunch and relax with some respite from the blazing sun.

Before

After

The herbs and vegetables that escaped the snails are doing well. When I see that I am winning the battle of snails, I will sow new seeds to replace the ones we lost. The orange sweet potatoes that I had rooting on a window-sill pushed out healthy growth and roots. Half of the plants are ready for planting. It is the first time that I have done the half-potato-in-a-glass-jar method of making plants. I was keen to grow a different colour sweet potato and decided to try this method in the absence of runners that I could plant.

The new sweet potato plants in the cottage window

I missed most of the flowering bulbs this year, but the Dutch irises and Clivias made up for it. The Clivias I rescued from the dump, added to the flowering of the existing yellow and orange Clivias in the garden.

The birds in the orchard are pre-empting the ripening of the early peaches by testing the young fruit even before they have softened. I picked some of the bird damaged fruit, but realised they are far from ready. Even the extreme heat is not going to rush them into ripening.

The deep shade under the oak provides a haven from the hot sun but not from the heat. It is a heat that hangs in the garden with a wilting promise of the summer that awaits us. Where we enjoy lunch under the oaks, the family of Wagtails walk the lawn trying to teach the two chicks how to feed themselves. Sometimes the chicks get a reprimand from a parent, when it is clear they are just following in the hope that they will be fed. 

I find it interesting that they feed all over the lawn but make sure to stay in the shade of the trees. The Robin looks for food in the deeper shade near the cottage hearth and the Olive thrush is happy to scratch in the undergrowth of the herbaceous border. The only bird that ventures into the sunny areas is the Cape Canary as it looks for seeds. 

I love the fact that the birds are so relaxed around us. Watching them calmly going about their business is an indication that all is well at Towerwater. A lizard scurries from the hot stone steps leading to the rosarium to a shady section of the stone rosarium retaining wall. Eager to escape the heat of the moment.

Simplicity

Spending more time in Cape Town gave us time to explore and rediscover favourite places. Apart from loving our ‘new’ courtyard where Table Mountain is a constant presence, I had the opportunity to browse around in book stores. Books are my one weakness and I never manage to walk out of a book store without one.

Ottolenghi Simple

That is how I found myself on a busy afternoon in Kloof Street, Cape Town, with the latest offering from Yotam Ottolenghi, Simple, in my hands. If a cookbook from a favourite chef is in my hand, it will be in my library at Towerwater.

New season pomegranates

The title promised easy recipes. I am eager to add Yotam’s Middle Eastern inspired dishes to my lunch and dinner menus. If they are simple easy dishes, I am all for it. I was curious to see what he saw as simple because, in his own words, cooking for him “has always been about abundance, bounty, freshness and surprise.” A philosophy I like to follow at Towerwater.

Tomato seedlings

The Simplicity was in that one can make the recipes in 30 minutes or less, with 10 or fewer ingredients and in a single pot. The ingredients read like Towerwater’s sowing and harvesting chart, with tomatoes, dill, basil, coriander, carrots, aubergine, courgette, pomegranate, fig and many more.

Beetroot and carrots

Courgettes

Looking at all the young seedlings in the garden, I wonder if they realise what an important task they are facing. Adding the ingredients to meals from my new cookbook. While my seedlings are growing, I add my new cookbook to the rest of my Ottolenghi collection in the Towerwater library. I derive joy seeing the collection complete with the latest offering, plain and simple.

Crime and punishment

The new fully secured rosarium

After four intense weeks of security upgrades to the properties in Cape Town and Bonnievale, life is slowly returning to normal. Or I suppose a new normal. I could not find a creative way to write about security beams, zones and perimeters. October ended up being very thin on the blog side.

All the detail of the security breaches I am not going into at the moment. But the sheer maliciousness of the crimes is what made us decide to extensively upgrade our security. Part of what happened at Towerwater was that the people that broke into the garden office after picking most of the oranges and lemons, proceeded to take bites out of the fruit before throwing them down on the ground. Not taking any of it, but leaving it wasted and unusable.

We understand when people take fruit to eat because they are hungry or want to sell it. But to destroy it so that nobody can benefit from it, is just wrong. As with anything else on the homestead, even the security needs to conform to the aesthetics of a 19^th century farm house. So we went for invisible beams all around the borders of the property. We hope that by December, everyone that freely ignored our other security measures before, will learn that climbing into the property will not go unnoticed anymore. We have had a couple of breaches since the upgrades, but they have climbed out faster than they climbed in.

The damage to the Cape Town property was more of a structural nature. Sad, after all the effort we put into the historically sensitive renovations. The damage to the Victorian detail of a door and window was heart-breaking. We were soon uplifted when we discovered that the joinery business that made the original replacement wood detail more than 30 years ago still existed. Not only that, they were as amazed to find clients dating back more than 30 years. Very kindly, they made up replacement components for the broken detailing, for free.

To maintain the integrity of a historical property in today’s day and age is not easy. Although the new beams take getting used to, it helps to know that they are not only protecting us but the buildings as well.

We are getting used to the new beams. Relaxed in the knowledge that our guardian angels are constantly looking out for us. In a time when being a victim of crime is not uncommon, it is sad that one gets punished for it in more ways than one. The financial loss seems to be the least of it when one factors in the trauma, resulting loss of creativity and a suspended life, while trying to get everything back to normal.

My row of bush beans after  snails got to them

While I was thus distracted, snails have taken the gap, destroying most of my seedlings for the new season. That is a crime I cannot let go unpunished. I have to deal with the snail crime wave in my herb and vegetable beds before I can sow again. Maybe eating them will be an appropriate punishment for their eating the seedlings. But, the process of preparing them seems more like a reversal of punishment.