Easter weekend away at Sandstone Estates in the Eastern Freestate and the following one with a broken computer means there's some catching up to do!
Sandstone is a large commercial arable farm which grows Sunflowers, Soya and Maize, but it is home to a huge collection of Heritage items, tractors, cars, trucks, military vehicles and a 26-km 2' narrow-gauge railway system and now 23 restored steam locomotives from 65-tonne Garratts to tiny sugar-cane puffers, four diesels and any number of coaches and wagons. It is a place of Superlatives! There was a 10-day extravaganza, showing off this whole collection as well as visiting items like vintage aeroplanes:
An unusual way to observe sunflowers, Helianthus annuus, just a few of a calculated 21,960,000 of them, ripe for harvest!
...... 263,400,000 Soya Bean plants........
and 51,760,000 Maize plants:
To cap it, hectares of Cosmos were out:
Otherwise the vegetation was not familiar, although I noticed slangbos, Stoebe plumosa or Seriphium plumosum, not a welcome sight in the grazing. More about them from today below!
Unfortunately, for fear of being thrown off the armoured vehicle I was riding on, I didn't get a chance to photograph a grove of old Oaks, probably planted for acorns for pig feed. They were distinctive in that they had multiple stems from the ground up, and the leaves were extremely dark green in colour.
Back to familiar ground, last Sunday, the highlights were, firstly the first open Protea cynaroides in our 'patch'!
.... and yet another specimen of Liparia splendens, bringing the total in our area to nine. This one was simply covered in flowers!
What must be the last of this year's Tritoniopsis (lata?)
We checked that the logging hadn't affected the single Muraltia heisteria we have found:
.... and the photo shows that the Lobelia tomentosa is still out!
This bird was strutting around the newly-felled forest, we don't have a name for it yet:
In the village, Demetrius' Chorisia speciosa or Silk Floss tree, originally from South America, is in spectacular flower, one of very few which flower here in the Western Cape:
and in our own garden, a different Bromeliad is in flower. Pippa found a Lesser Double-collared Sunbird feasting on it in the week:
..... near the other which just goes on and on!
We were watching the weather forecast, 8mm for this afternoon, so we had our flower walk this morning! We almost beat it, only getting wet as we got home. We inspected the light green / white Erica we found a few weeks ago, hoping that the flowers might have developed, but there's no change.
Close by we spotted a single leaf growing from the base of a beautiful pink Gladiolus we found last year. We've been checking on the spent flower which can be seen:
In the distance we spotted a raptor settling on a rocky outcrop. It was a lot to ask my little camera to catch it at the extreme end of its zoom-range, but it didn't look like the usual Jackal Buzzard:
We haven't seen any flowers on the Wild Figs or Carpobrotus plants. We were lucky today!
New leaves have been coming out on the Pelargoniums for a while; today we spotted the first flowers. In a couple of weeks there will be lots, judging from the buds:
We didn't ever decide on a name for this tall Erica. It's interesting to see what the spent flowers and the new growth looks like:
Regarding the Slangbos, we noticed interesting white flowers on what we thought were already flowers!
The oncoming rain made us walk back through the forest which we haven't visited for a long time. Here and there were striking examples of Ficinia radiata or Stergras:
During the week, Pippa attended a mushroom course, and this forest was a Happy Hunting Ground! One step inside and we found our first Slippery Jack or Suillus luteus:
They were taught how to prepare them, the spongy under-layer and skin is peeled off and discarded and the remainder eaten, preferably after cooking!
It wasn't long before we found an example of the Purple-stemmed Russula sardonia:
While technically edible, it has a very strong chili-like flavour. Jenny's photo from the course:
We are now fairly sure this is Brabejum stellatifolium or Wild Almond as van Riebeeck used for his famous hedge. This gives an idea of the size and denseness. It looks fast-growing, too:
Now it's pouring on and off and this afternoon we meet at Max Harris Park in the village to see what we can do to upgrade this derelict park and old graveyard, next to the Old Age Home.
:-) A
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
No comments:
Post a Comment