17th March 2013
Boggy Hollow? Well, the hollow only has enough water in it to be a Pond for three months of the year… and my trips out there are becoming more “hollow”…
The See-Saw is entirely in my mind. All the good hard-headed reasons for ending the adventure get tilted out of kilter when I sit on a camp stool outside the cabin, listening to a Night-jar in the trees around me having a slanging match with a distant Duck. The stars above are just stupidly Disney-clear, and the breeze wafts the smell of dew on the grass mixed with just a tincture of fresh cow-dung…
The dew turns to fog, which hides the stars, shuts the duck up, makes the security lights around the School glow like a fairground, and at least mutes the thumping bass and drink-sodden altercations from the Bar…
The Night-jar continues provoking the Duck – there’s no reply, and suddenly the bird’s call sounds lonely… as I am.
“What the heck, maybe this place could work,” I muse. It wouldn’t sell quickly anyway, so I might as well carry on, getting some pleasure out of it whenever I can, and perhaps adding a little value by clearing more aliens and rehabilitating the existing dams. With fair rains this winter, I might even scratch out a crop of some kind…
Hmm, let’s see: The round-trip from Muizenberg is 270Km. That’s about 27 litres of petrol at near-enough R13 per litre, which is R351 a trip in fuel alone. How much produce would I need to harvest to pay for that?
Based on The Farmer’s Weekly Market prices in late December, I would need to sell either 167 Kg. Cabbages, or 115 Kg. Carrots, or 120 Kg. Onions, or 110 Kg. Potatoes, or 44 Kg. Tomatoes just to pay for the petrol to get to Boggy Pond. Add half again for just one day’s Labour and assume I manage that without buying fertilizer…
Considering that the growing season would be very short due to water supply issues, and my fantasy comes crashing down.
When the frustration of living and working in Gauteng started becoming an issue for me a few years back, I muttered in jest to my friend Vianne about “Becoming a subsistence farmer instead,” she quipped “But you wouldn’t even know the right time to plant subsistents!”
[Whoa! I am officially spooked! The very second I finished that sentence, Vianne “oinked” through on Skype – the first time in about six months!]
Not knowing how to grow and care for “subsistents” wasn’t an issue for me at the time, because I was also tired of being the guy with the answers – on just about everything. I longed to learn something new from someone who knew what they were talking about – someone who had the same enquiring approach to their field of knowledge. When I first started working at Boggy Pond, I was quite hopeful, because I met a veteran farmer living nearby who clearly had the knowledge. Unfortunately his personal circumstances soon changed and he moved nearer Caledon. Not that the distance itself is an issue – the problem is that he manages a large chicken farm, which is a 24/7 operation. The man has his hands full holding his own life together – I certainly understand that! The main issue of course is that – as I know from the other side of the fence – you can’t hope to “mentor” somebody who isn’t actually engaged in trying to do what they want to do!
I considered teaming up with somebody from the village – but small-scale vegetable farming stalled here a generation ago when the spring water was piped into the houses. Of course the system was expensive and had to be maintained and paid for, but water became too expensive to use in the quantities required for even subsistence farming. Too often, we fail to consider the possibility that impoverishment and loss of hope could follow as unintended consequences of “progress”.
In my dream world, getting one smallholding productive again would be a catalyst for others…
A dream world indeed…