“My little boy saw me cutting open a melon, removing the seeds and rinsing them to keep for planting and he asked me: 'Mom, I don't understand, why is anyone hungry in the world?'”
A poignant story from Christine Stevens; a writer, chef and organic fundi who left the Western Cape winelands for a brief visit to Grahamstown earlier this week.
“My little boy saw me cutting open a melon, removing the seeds and rinsing them to keep for planting and he asked me: 'Mom, I don't understand, why is anyone hungry in the world?'”
A poignant story from Christine Stevens; a writer, chef and organic fundi who left the Western Cape winelands for a brief visit to Grahamstown earlier this week.
“There is no better feeling than walking about your garden at the end of a hard day's work, excitedly picking your spoils and deciding what to make your family for dinner,” she said.
Stevens lives on the farm with her husband and two children where they grow their own organic food and run one of South Africa's few organic vineyards, Mountain Oaks. She hosted an organic wine-tasting event at Haricot's Bistro on New Street on Monday, and welcomed curious locals to pick her brain about the organic approach and her books.
Mumsie Gumede, the new director of Umthathi Training Project, was eager to gain some insight into the tricks of chemical-free gardening. “Umthathi is all about teaching people to have holistically healthy lives, mentally and physically,” Gumede said. “Safely growing your own food forms a big part of this.”
Some interesting advice that Stevens had to offer was: “A good way to keep snails away is to place yoghurt container lids in the soil around the plants and fill them with beer; it attracts the snails and kills them”.
Besides intoxicating snails, Stevens had another suggestion for pest control. “Or what we've also done is just wake up very early, pick off the snails one by one and then feed them to the chickens.”
But it's taken them some time to figure out how to maintain a natural balance on their land. Stevens recalled when they were first establishing the organic farm and their vines were plagued by snout nosed beetles. Not being able to spray chemicals, they left the beetles to do their own thing and a year later the beetles' natural predators were drawn to the abundance of food and equilibrium was restored.
“We need to start producing and stop this mass consuming,” Stevens said. “If we each used just a metre of land to grow our own food, we'd be saving money and investing in healthier lives and mindsets.”
Steven has published two books, Harvest, Recipes from an Organic Farm and Harvest Diaries. She told Grocott's Mail that she is working on a new publication about recipes for preserves and pickling.
