Grootbos Nature Reserve Part 2 - Fynbos and Philosophy

This is the second installment of our wonderful night away at Grootbos Private Nature Reserve. Read the first part here.

The view from our deck at dawn

Waking up in the morning to a dawn sky, soaking in the bath and watching colours change as the sun creeps over the hill behind us, listening to bird chatter in the fynbos, a magical start to the day at Grootbos
 

The bath tub with the best ever view

We’d planned two activities for the morning – if we’d been staying longer we would have just chosen one and had a lazy lie-in, but as it was we were at breakfast by 8 and spoilt for choice both with the buffet and the cooked to order hot breakfast.

There were cereals, muesli, yoghurt and bowls of seeds, nuts, raspberry and passionfruit puree as toppings, fruit salad, sliced fruits, cold meats and even smoked trout as well as fresh croissants and muffins. I went for a very decadent Eggs Benedict and then re-visited the buffet because I couldn’t resist the smoked trout and a croissant.

Grootbos is so much more than just a lovely five star retreat, though it does all that superbly well in a friendly and unpretentious style. I loved all the pampering, fantastic food and comfort, but it was the activities and the place itself that made the biggest impression. The nature  reserve grew out of the owner, Michael Lutzeyer’s, mission to conserve the beautiful fynbos eco-system of this region and their conservation programme has developed to an award-winning world class level. Not just that but the importance of enriching and giving back to the community here is actively recognised in two very successful social responsibility programmes.

The plant nursery at the Green Futures project

We were shown round both by Anecke, herself a graduate of the horticulture Green Futures training programme. Every year eight candidates are carefully selected from the two neighbouring communities of Stanford and Gansbaai and receive a very thorough grounding in both indigenous horticulture and basic life skills. As well as learning all about the fynbos plants and how to grow them, they learn computer skills, how to keep accounts, how to drive, language and interview skills. There is also an exchange link with the Eden Project in Cornwall UK, so every year three students get to travel there for three weeks and experience conservation  overseas.

The vegetable gardens at the Growing the Future programme

The second programme Growing the Future is aimed at local women between the ages of 18 and 35 and is a year course in growing organic vegetables and fruits. After three years this is becoming a self-sustaining initiative, growing produce to sell to the lodges, free-range chickens providing the eggs we’d just eaten for our breakfasts, bee-keeping producing delicious fynbos honey to sell in the shop and making preserves for the restaurants. Graduates from both programmes receive a nationally accredited certificate and can go on to do further training on site as guides or as lodge staff, or apply to do further horticultural training elsewhere. Many of them choose to work at Grootbos and the cheerful faces, confident and individual personalities of all the staff and guides we met are a testament to the success of the training.

Lavender for companion planting in the vegetable garden

We were whisked back to the lodge just in time to sally forth once more on our 4x4 fynbos safari with Jo, a wonderfully eccentric guide with a passion for her subject and a sprinkling of philosophy thrown in.

As we left the road and headed up a mountain trail she stopped to pick mysterious sprigs of restio, erica, protea and with hilarious deadpan anecdotes showed us so much more about how the natural fynbos eco-system works.

I’d never realised that the humble sour fig, which grows like crazy on our farm, is a vital refuge for small animals such as tortoises during fires. They can creep into its shelter and the succulent leaves protect them from the fire’s heat. I hadn’t known that restios are either male or female, that certain ericas need fire to reproduce: so many details shared in an entertaining and fascinating way. We also discovered the source of that elusive honey fynbos scent  that pervades the bush around the lodge – metalasia muricata, or its less than glamorous common name, the cauliflower bush.

Jo picking sprigs of metalasia muricata

Jo stopped the vehicle at a beautiful viewpoint for snacks, delicious home-baked cookies in four flavours, and while we were eating and chatting she wove all the plant samples picked on the way into a stunning bouquet, then turned wedding photographer to each couple in turn.

After this tour we were filled with even more respect  and admiration for how much Grootbos has done in the last 20 years to preserve, restore and protect the incredibly rich flora, gradually acquiring more land as neighbouring farms were sold, until they now have over 2000 hectares of pristine hill, milkwood forest and mountain.

The main lodge at sunset

Back at the lodge it was already lunch time, time for us to reluctantly leave, but we stayed long enough  to sample the lunch buffet, a fresh and flavoursome feast of salads with a choice of three hot mains to follow and even a dessert, though we were still too full from breakfast to make it all the way through the menu.

There were so many more activities that there just wasn’t time for in our short visit: horse riding trails through the fynbos, beach walks and picnics, a coastal cave tour, whale watching in the winter months, and of course the spa in the milkwood forest where there is no need of canned birdsong relaxation tapes, as the real thing wafts in through the open doors.

All in all I found Grootbos a thoroughly magical place to visit and the memories are sustaining me through a rather hectic week. If you get the opportunity, do not hesitate – go there and stay for as long as you can!

Fynbos bouquet

Note for my non-South African readers: fynbos is the name given to a particular type of vegetation mainly found in the southern tip of Africa. Low bushy green scrub is what it looks like to the eye, not a tree in sight. But when you look up close you find an enormous variety of different plants and flowers. Our guide, Jo, explained that to be identified as fynbos it should have four principal types of plants: proteas, ericas, restios and bulbinous plants. It’s an eco-system that supports many birds and small animals, but not a single giraffe or elephant! It's beautiful, fascinating and just as an essential item on any traveller's bucket list as the Big Five.

Disclosure: Our stay at Grootbos was complimentary, but I received no remuneration for writing this post and all opinions are my own.

Grootbos Nature Reserve – Five Star Fynbos Getaway

The view from our suite

We’re back from a fabulous night away at Grootbos, a gorgeous nature reserve overlooking Walker Bay, near Hermanus, whither I was very kindly invited, to experience its magic for myself. A patchwork of impressions and memories: a rich green canvas of incredibly varied fynbos, friendly faces, fabulous flavours, mysterious milkwood forest, winding paths and entrancing views. You could stay for a week and never have a dull moment, but we crammed as much as we could into our 24 hours and would happily go back for more tomorrow!

Looking up at Forest Lodge from the road, we had no idea of what we’d find... we saw an unimposing row of low linear buildings perched high on a hill that seemed uniformly green with the native fynbos, dense and bushy, of the forest there was no obvious sign... But as soon as we parked the car the magic began to weave its spell.

Winding paths led through a beautifully planted fynbos garden, scented with honey and shaded by ancient milkwood trees. The paths are designed so that you hardly see the main lodge building until you are upon it, feeling almost lost in the forest, when in fact it is right there all the time.

Forest Lodge is spacious, understated and modern, soaking up the views from huge glass walls, softened by lots of wood, textured fabrics with patterns of leaf and protea, natural decorations and fynbos flower arrangements.

The warm welcome from all the staff, who are always smiling and genuinely happy to be working in such a beautiful place really adds to the positive energy.

The pool at Forest Lodge overlooks pristine fynbos and the ocean

In our suite/cottage we were spoilt for space. Built on the same understated modern lines as the main lodge, it is warm and welcoming, with wooden floors.

There’s a bedroom, a sitting room with a built in fireplace, a huge bathroom with the tub right in the big window looking out of the view and even a second bathroom. The deck in front links both rooms and the fynbos comes right up to it, so that you can lie in bed watching the birds flitting in and out of bushes and smell that delicious honey scent in elusive wafts on the morning breeze. There’s an outdoor shower out there too, but it wasn’t quite warm enough to tempt us. The sitting room has a comfortable leather sofa, lovely wooden tables and best of all the fireplace with a generous stack of logs. We lost no time in making a cup of tea and putting our feet up after our long drive.

Patrick and Chumani  on our Milkwood Forest walk

We’d signed up for a guided walk through the milkwood forest at 5. It was just us and our guide Chumani, who led us off down the paved paths, until we came to the beginning of a small trail. As soon as we’d left the main path it felt like we were in the middle of ancient forests far from anywhere. The milkwood trees take forever to grow, some of them being several hundred years old, and they are not tall, but there is a peace and quietness to the air, hanging lichens, twisted branches. It’s baboon territory, the home of birds and buck, but although we see the tracks of buck and the baboon poo and twigs they have broken, the animals themselves are elusive. Chumani was an entertaining guide, telling us all sorts of stories and  the uses of many plants learned from his grandfather.

Twisting branches of ancient milkwoods, festooned with lichens and mosses

Then it’s a meander back to our cottage to relax and change before dinner. The sun is streaming in now as the sun dips lower and we both start to go mad with our cameras catching angles and patterns and feeling almost giddy off on our own without the kids.

Photographers on holiday

  A spectacular sunset over the ocean reminds us why sundowners are such a great South African institution. We have cups of tea instead and leap up every five seconds to take another photo.

Then just when I think the drama is over and am about to view the afterglow from the vantage point of the shower, I spot a sliver of new moon hanging just above the sunset orange. It feels like a wonderful promise of more magic to come.

Dinner was a five course gourmet feast. A full on review would be a blog post in itself, but suffice it to say that I had a wonderful time identifying flavours, tasting  my husband’s dishes as well as my own and trying desperately to photograph the plates in appropriate food blogger style in low light conditions. We had a hilarious time improvising a mini studio with his phone as light source and napkin as a diffuser.

The taste highlights for me were the amuse bouche of fish tartare, mussel cracker fish with coriander and lemon zest in a crisp filo pastry shell, and the oh so tender kingklip with a pea and chorizo sauce.

Grilled kingklip, pea and chorizo veloute,tatsoi and truffle salad with improvised studio lighting

The night was clear, starry, windy and rather chilly, so it was a brisk walk rather than romantic stroll back to our cottage after dinner, where the fire had been lit for us, curtains drawn, bed turned down. It was cosy and intimate, the bed very comfortable and, we fell asleep to the sounds of wind gusting around the roof, looking forward to all the activities planned for the next day.

Our next morning’s activities and fynbos safari make up another post, so read Part 2  for more Grootbos magic!

Disclosure: Our stay at Grootbos was complimentary. I received no remuneration for writing this post and all opinions are my own.

Easter Trees and Easter Goodies

The Easter bunny has never been known for his restraint when he visits our farm. Egged on by two doting aunts he provides an egg hunt of epic proportions, spread around the four houses on our farm.  This year one aunt was deeply worried that the children would be disappointed as she hadn’t had a chance to furnish the bunny with much in the way of eggs, and just maybe they wouldn’t  have the usual excessive amount of little eggs.

He has always left an egg in the children’s trees. They each have one. Our son’s planted on his first birthday (now a well established flowering tree), the girls’ planted together just after Youngest was born. Unfortunately theirs never thrived where we put them. Middle Daughter’s pompom tree sadly died, needing richer soil and far more water than it could find and Youngest’s had to be moved into the orchard irrigation system as it was surviving but only just.  So it was of utmost importance to plant themselves new trees before Easter Day.... something that from this tree planting post I see I’d been promising for nearly two years.

On Saturday I finally took them tree buying.  There is a nursery down a very long dirt road not far from us, that we’d never been to, so we trundled and bumped along there and were pleased to find a good selection of indigenous trees. Middle Daughter had in mind a coral tree, which has gorgeous flame red flowers in spring, but they only had some tiny new plugs. The girls perused all the rows, reading all the labels.

Eventually Youngest decided on a White Stinkwood (an elegant deciduous tree much prettier than its name) and Middle Daughter chose a Red Alder (which apparently has creamy white flowers that the birds and insects like in autumn). I bought two coral tree plugs as they are so pretty once they are flowering, even though it will probably be ten years away growing them from so small.

Back home we got out the dowsing rods to find suitable places to plant them.

A few meters each way can make a huge difference to whether a tree grows well here. You can see the ones that have found their own water. The ones that haven’t have hardly grown in ten years, despite being watered through the summer months.

Then we waited for the fierce south-easter to drop to do the actual planting. It never did, so we went back out into it at the end of the afternoon, dug, composted, watered, planted mulched and staked.

Those trees are going to be the best looked after trees on the farm, already having been treated to the proceeds of a cleaned out rabbit hutch today!

Easter morning dawned overcast but not at all cold. I had to hop out of bed fairly smartly to beat the children to it, not that any of them still have any illusions about where the eggs come from, but it still spoils the fun if they actually witness the eggs being hidden by human hands! It turned out that the Easter bunny’s other major source had over-compensated for the one aunt’s lack and I had to be even more ingenious than ever to find enough hiding places that were both in the shade and reasonably dog-proof!

When the children went out to search at 7.30 on Easter morning, eggs were discovered in nooks and crannies all over the place and of course in the new trees.

The total harvest came to more even than last year and after the grand counting and re-distribution had taken place each child had a shocking 79 small eggs! Enough to last them till August at least!

Our Autumn Festival

We long ago realised that our festivals now have their own energy and momentum.  Whether we invite them or not, the people who are meant to be at any particular festival come. Sometimes there are big crowds, other times just one family. Each festival somehow comes together perfectly out of the chaos of our last minute organisation.

Our autumn festival last week was a case in point. We usually have them on the nearest Saturday to the solstice or equinox but that Saturday was taken up with our friends' wedding. The following weekend was Easter. So we thought we’d have it on the Thursday,  the equinox itself which happened to be a public holiday. But then we didn’t get around to organising anything, or inviting anyone – we were all tired, recovering from colds and completely lacking in energy.

We thought it would probably end up just being us. The girls of course protested – half the fun for them is running around with their friends. So the day before we asked two sets of local friends if they’d like to come along to a very last minute festival. One family could, the other mother couldn’t get away, but her kids were determined to come anyway, another school friend asked to come and the daughter of the girls' riding teacher begged to come along, though her mother was going to be working. All of a sudden it became a children’s festival with just a bare minimum of adults along.

It worked perfectly. We put all the kids in charge of getting the circle and sandpit sorted. They carved gem squash, while two adults had a go at the pumpkins, and then the kids disappeared outside to build and decorate sand-castles.

The few adults sorted the food (soups, bread and bean stew, followed by the inevitable choccie pudding and guava fool), and wrote our blessings, found the printed vision prayers, put together a basket of harvest goodies and that was it. Simple and effective and just right for this particular occasion.

The one element that we didn’t manage this year was making straw angels, or rather angels from restios, flowers and any found natural material, but here are two posts from previous autumn festivals that show some pictures of them, as well as our kids looking so much younger that it begs sentimental nostalgia every time I look back!

A Wedding and A Quiche Recipe

We went to a lovely wedding last weekend. As a nine-year-old the bride had helped open our presents at our wedding and now it was her turn. Having watched our wedding video once a year all their lives, our kids now think it’s normal to sit on a picnic blanket and open all the wedding presents there and then, so they were rather disappointed to hear that they were unlikely to see the pressies being opened at this one. I had to explain that baking a batch of cookies as a gift might not be a good idea, because some couples even wait till after the honeymoon to open their wedding presents. How could that be possible!

Weddings are exciting and infrequent events for our girls. It’s a far cry from Four Weddings and a Funeral where Hugh Grant wakes up and says wearily, “Who is it this Saturday?”  As soon as they heard that our friends had become engaged, it was, "When is the wedding?" and "Will they have bridesmaids?" They are just the right age to enjoy an occasion to dress up and have an important role to play, so were thrilled when they were asked to be flower girls. Youngest already had the perfect dress and Middle Daughter had her first ever shopping expedition dedicated to finding her the perfect dress, exhausting but successful.

They were married under an ancient oak tree in a completely home-made ceremony that involved all their family and of course the strewing of rose petals by the flower girls. The girls said it was the best wedding they’d ever been to!

And the quiches? The maid of honour organised all the guests to contribute a recipe to a book she was compiling for them.  Due to a long-standing, if rather well-worn in-joke, my sister-in-law and I both decided to provide our quiche recipes. I immediately searched through my blog, convinced that I must have shared the recipe at least once in the last seven years (Yes, it’s coming up to my seven year blogiversary already!) only to find that I never had put the whole recipe up. Once I’d posted  a pea quiche recipe, once a sweet plum quiche, but never my staple spinach and feta quiche recipe with pastry instructions attached. So here it is, along with a little of the story that goes with it.


Spinach and Feta Quiche Recipe

Once long ago, pastry was a terrifying mystery to me. I loved it, but it did not love me. So I avoided it in the kitchen and gave quiches a wide berth.

That is until one day, when we still lived in the cottage and Youngest was a new baby, Kirsty (the  daughter of our dear friend Ursie, who was a home-cooking inspiration and who had recently died of cancer) offered to show me how her mother made hers: the pastry turned out to be simple, no great secrets and it’s been working perfectly ever since.

So here are my jotted notes from Kirsty’s impromptu lesson. She, being her mother’s daughter, didn’t need a recipe to work from, but I usually refer back to my notes just in case I lose the magic touch!


Pastry for quiche or any other savoury tart
1 cup cake flour
50g cold, hard butter
Pinch salt
Iced water to mix

The only secret of pastry seems to be keeping it all cold. So use the butter straight from the fridge and use icy cold water to mix it.
1. Cut the butter into dice and rub it quickly and lightly into the flour until it looks like breadcrumbs.
2. Mix in the iced water a little at a time until it comes together as a dough. It might need half a cup of water or more or less. Just add it a tablespoon or so at a time, stirring with a knife. When there is enough water, it will knead into to a ball of dough quickly. It should be soft but not sticky.
3. Wrap the pastry ball in cling film and rest in the fridge for at least half an hour.
4. Roll out the pastry thin enough to fit a roughly 23cm dish or tin.
5. Blind bake: put piece of foil or greaseproof paper in the pastry case, fill it with dry beans to weight it down and bake at 190C for 10-15 minutes.

Filling for Spinach and Feta Quiche
3 large eggs
1 cup of cream
1 bunch of spinach
1 round of feta (from those Simonsberg pots)
Salt, pepper and nutmeg

Steam or boil one bunch of spinach or swiss chard until just tender. Drain well and chop roughly, discarding the liquid as it oozes.
Chop or crumble one round of feta cheese into small pieces.
Beat together cream and eggs and season with salt and pepper
Once the pastry has blind baked, put the spinach in the bottom of the case, sprinkle over the feta, pour in the egg mixture. If you like nutmeg, grate a little over the top.
Bake the quiche at 190C for30-40 minutes until golden and set.

You can make the pastry the day before, and roll it out into the dish. Cover it with cling film and keep in the fridge till ready to bake.

Vegan Treats and A Market

Most months I share a market stall with a friend at our local Camphill market. It’s more a social day out than a money-making enterprise, a chance to meet local friends, for the kids to earn a bit of pocket money by baking and selling their biscuits and for me to earn enough to pay for our lunch and a few other goodies.

It means getting up at six on a Sunday, baking up a storm with the girls and then, more often than not, leaving the kitchen an icing sugar dusted chaos of baking trays and mixing bowls for my husband to sort out, as we dash for the door bearing trays and containers of crunchies, muffins and iced biscuits.

Last month I had two customers asking if I had anything vegan. I didn’t. All my baking is lavish with real butter. But I promised to work out a vegan version of my crunchie recipe and bring it to the next market. I reckoned I could replace the butter with coconut oil, decrease the refined sugar quotient (to make them healthier) by using molasses instead of syrup and go from there. What I didn’t know was quite how the texture would turn out. Would they be crunchy, or cakey, or crumbly? I left it till the last minute to try out, so only on Saturday did I put my re-jigged recipe to the test. It worked.

They were crunchy and only a tiny bit crumbly. And they tasted good, though of course different to real butter crunchies – more deep molasses flavour and less buttery toffee smoothness. I’m not going to share the recipe just yet, as I want to tweak the quantities a bit more, but I sold most of them and had good feedback.

The other coincidentally vegan recipe I’d been meaning to try ever since I read it on Lucullian Delights was farinata. It’s a traditional Italian flatbread-come-pancake made with chickpea flour. It’s the perfect example of Italy’s cucina povera coming up with the ultimate in dishes catering to modern food preferences – gluten free and vegan - and is very easy to make. It’s a brilliant snack or accompaniment to a meal, if you have unexpected vegan or gluten intolerant visitors  to cater for.

I’d bumped into some chana flour in our local Spar, so grabbed it (pretty sure that I remembered chana meant chickpea). Then I tried the recipe out on my family in the week, was very surprised that the girls really liked it, and decided that farinata too must come to the market.

We have home-grown onions hanging in the garage, tomatoes being harvested quicker than I can cope with them, so I was even able to feel virtuous about its organic locally grown ingredients... apart from the flour of course which was bound to be flown in from somewhere far-off!

It was a hot day and the market rather quiet, as people headed for the beach instead of inland sun spots, but I sold most of my wares. The girls were busy with organising and taking part in games for their school stall, so were rather weary by the end but nothing that a refreshing dip in the pool wouldn’t fix as soon as we got home again.