Dear Friend of the Farm
What’s the best gift for Mom?
Celebrating Mom with Mother Nature.
What’s as nurturing as mothers love? If you ask us, it’s celebrating Mother Nature with your Mom and cultivating seeds that grow into healthy veggies that nourish Mom and your family. Whether you have a mother, or you are a mother yourself, if you want to be around for many years to come, use this Mother’s Day to start making small healthy changes in your everyday routines that will have a lasting impact.
You can start this Mothers Day on Saturday 11 May from 10h00, just bring a picnic to enjoy with Mom under the oaks at OZCF. You can also get some exercise planting greens, enjoy music courtesy of Cape Talk, buy some veggie seedlings and other plants and meet like-minded souls in a chilled setting.
OZCF in the spotlight
In recent weeks OZCF has been featured in Sunday Times, Weekend Argus, Cape Times,Die Burger, Atlantic Sun, The Cape Towner, and on RSG Radio. We’re on the Cape Town Green Map (online), in Simply Green Magazine, SA Property News (online), SABI Magazine (landscape and irrigation), Cape Town Magazine, Good Taste Magazine(online), Eat Out Magazine (online), Cape Town Globalist (UCT’s Magazine), City Views, and Future Cape Town (online). Whew!
OZCF welcomed
We have been fortunate to have visitors from various organisations in recent weeks. Some highlights include:
- SEED, an integrated environmental education programme that provides training for educators, develops outdoor classrooms and gardens at schools, and inspires and motivates learners to be green leaders of the future.
- Grandwest Casino Nursery team, specialist in fynbos propagation.
- Food Baskets for Africa helps to place food tunnels in communities with training for tunnel care, watering, fertilizing. business skills and financial profitability.
Bright young minds visited
What a pleasure to host learners of all ages, most recently the following:
- Stepping Stones Montessori Pre Primary
- Kildare Primary
- St Cyprians School
- Teachers from Herzlia School
Heartfelt thanks to
- Reliance Compost for ever more compost (huzzah!)
- Michells Wholesale Nursery (with us on Mother’s Day selling plants and giving gifts to Moms!)
- Talborne Organics
- Simon Barnett for the new OZCF website!
- Shannon Draper from The Gravel Garden for inspiration and heirloom seeds
- Saturday lunch givers: Beth Silbert, Jenni Jedeikin, Nicky Kurgan, Fiona Fisher, Dena Lomofsky, Lauren Cohn, Leon Traut, Coletta Canale, Sue Kramer , Tanya Franco, Ina Tayler
- All the volunteers who give so freely of their time. You truly are what makes OZCF happen!
Can you help?
- We are looking for closer accommodation for farm workers – our two wonderful farm workers, Cecil and Clinton, travel very far each day and we are looking for basic accommodation in our Oranjezicht neighbourhood, in return for looking after the garden one day a week. If you can help with accommodation for one or both, please call 083 628 3426 for details.
- We need to raise funds for an earthworm farm designed and built by Full Cycle. Vermicompost and ‘worm tea’ improve plant growth and health. The castings of earthworms contain 7 times the available phosphorus, 6 times the available nitrogen, 3 times the available magnesium, twice the available carbon and 1.5 times the available calcium. A self-contained 2.5 m x 1 m design that is vinyl wrapped with educational and marketing material is proposed. The system has a processing capacity of 200kgs a day, producing 400 litres of vermitea a week and 100kgs of vermicompost a month. With your help, OZCF can raise the R25 000 required. Please consider your support. See the donate section of the website for all the details.
With deep appreciation from the soles of our dirty boots to the tips of our green thumbs,
The Oranjezicht City Farm Team
