Team finally complete

The Team Is Finally Complete

Stephie has arrived for good. It sounds like a small sentence for what it actually means: months and months of a long-distance marriage, Robert on the farm and Stephie still in Switzerland finishing up her job, phone calls instead of dinners. That chapter is closed now and the farm has its full crew for the first time since we started.

Gobi

The team grew before Stephie even landed. Gobi joined us in December, half Belgian Malinois and entirely convinced that the twenty-one hectares are his to patrol. He has kept everyone on their toes since day one, which is exactly what you sign up for with that breed. This week he got a sparring partner: Fiona, the newest recruit, small enough that Gobi still isn’t sure what to make of her. Stephie gets to raise a puppy this time around too, something she missed out on with Gobi while she was still working in Switzerland and only meeting him through photos.

Farm21 Goes Solar

You don’t think much about electricity until it’s gone. In Europe an outage is rare enough that you can talk yourself out of the expense of solar and battery storage; here in South Africa, being able to keep your own lights on is not a luxury, it’s a plan. So we put in a solar system with battery storage and inverter. It works, and it works well enough that we now have a different problem. On a sunny day, once the battery is full and the sun keeps producing, there’s power going spare with nowhere useful to put it. What do you do with electricity you can’t store and don’t want to waste? Stay tuned, the solution might be surprising.

Robert’s Birthday Braai

Early August, Robert turned 53. The days before had been wet and windy in the way Wilderness winter weather likes to test you, and the days after went right back to it, but on the day itself we got lucky: clear, mild, the kind of afternoon you’d order if you could. Family, friends and neighbours came out for a braai, a fire pit providing heat and cozy atmosphere when it got colder in the evening. A very nice evening to celebrate Roberts level-up and our achievements so far.

International Logistics

Moving to another continent is a chance to leave behind everything that might have stopped serving you. But some things are hard to put a price on: furniture, artwork, tools, clothes; Everything that carries memory and function. So it was a proper occasion when the truck carrying the Smiths’ household finally arrived. It was also, immediately, great entertainment. The truck got stuck just past the gate, unable to go forward or back, which meant everyone on the property spent the next stretch of the afternoon carrying boxes by hand from the gate up to the house. Once the last box was in, the guys who’d driven up from Cape Town still had another hour to wait before the rescu arrived to haul the truck back out, reversing the whole length of Remskoen Street in a cloud of dust.

Socials and the Gallery Page

Something you might not know yet: our gallery page gets updated more often than this blog does, and we’ve now added an Instagram feed at the bottom of it. We know the blog posts don’t come out as regularly as we’d like. Between renovations, admin and the daily business of running a place like this, sitting down to write falls behind the other things that need doing. A photo on Instagram takes thirty seconds; a proper post takes an evening we don’t always have. So if you’re not on Instagram or just haven’t found us there, the gallery page is the place to catch what’s happening in between.

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