Pelargonium saved. For Now.

I know I’m a bit late with this post, but I think it’s important anyway.

Remember a while back I posted about the small Eastern Cape community of Alice who were challenging the German pharma giant Schwabe over their patenting of a remedy made from the roots of pelargonium sidoides and pelargonium reniforme –  that’s geraniums to you and me.

Well, in a thrilling case of little-guy-from-SA-backwater-takes-on-giant-baddies-and-wins, the European Patent Office last month revoked the  patent that Schwabe had applied for, which would have protected a method of processing the roots of the plants to get the desired extract.

According to this article in the Dispatch, a local Eastern Cape paper, the Germans are looking to fight the ruling, and, considering the resources they have available, they might win. But, I think this sets a great precedent, and hopefully more test cases like this one will appear, so we can work out a safe, innovative traditional knowledge and patent policy for this country.

Pic: Geranium by jurek d. on Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Roadtripping

Last week 2 friends and I and a Peugeot took a 4 day roadtrip to Cape Town. We decided that to drive the national road was just a fate worse than death, and chose, instead, to take the rout through the Karoo – the exquisite, desolate, semi-desert that covers most of the south-western area of South Africa. I love the Karoo. It’s empty and vast; boiling hot by day and cool by night, and somehow I feel like I can think more clearly when I’m there.

It’s full of small towns and snot-nosed kids and scruffy dogs and cottages with wide stoeps, designed to catch the breeze and keep you cool. The lamb you eat in the Karoo is the best you’ll ever taste – we don’t bother to call it “free range” becuase that’s the only kind you can get. Milk comes in recycled 2L Coke bottles, straight from the cow, thick with cream and almost beige, not thin, pale and white. Every small town has at least 2 butcheries, selling fresh meat, home-made boerewors and lamb chops, but the real treat is Karoo biltong, made from beef or, if you’re lucky, springbok. We bought beef biltong, nice and wet and chewy in a paper bag and grazed all the way to Cape Town.

Cottage, Victoria West

We read Drummer Hodge by Thomas Hardy to each other as we sped through the dry flatness. It really is an incredibly sad poem, and brings me out in goosebumps every time.

The Orange River

We listened to good tunes, and counted windmills and waved to kids on the side of the road. We saw sheep and cows and springbok and warthogs and eagles. We stopped to spit in the Orange River and emerged, on Day 3, into the oasis of Prince Albert, the prettiest town with the best olive oil in South Africa.

It’s hard to really describe what the Karoo looks like, becuase it’s such a shifting landscape. At different times of day, the sand and rocks takes on different colours, and the vegetation changes all the time.

I know it’s verboten to say things like this, but I really do get a little bit of a thrill when I look up at the sky in this country.

Where I’ve Been – Part 2

While making blankets might have kept me away from this blog during the winter, I can’t claim that anything as constructive has been keeping me away since then. And while I may not have been making things, I have been doing things, and I think that’s just as good an excuse, I think.

The most exciting thing was a quick trip to Berlin in mid-November. I’m lucky that the work I do does often feel like play, and that I get to work with amazing people on very cool projects, and do more than my fair share of traveling to do so, which I  know makes me a very lucky girl. The trip was up there with the best of them – I’ve never really spent much time in wintry European cities, and I have to admit, Berlinlandia stole my heart. What a fantastic, melancholy, beautiful, romantic, complicated city. What amazing Lebanese food. What great beer. Sinc this was a work trip, I didn’t get to do the garden snooping that I usually manage to cram in, and I didn’t buy a single seed. But I saw some very cool balcony gardens:

It’s easy to forget in SA, where we have abundant space that very few of us actually use to it’s full potential, that you can still fill your life with living, lovely things in a tiny little space.

Where I’ve Been

Well, away, of course. Both literally, and I guess, figuratively. See, I’ve been very busy with Stuff. And Things. And even with Activities. Which is usually quite unlike me – I’m a bit more slothful, generally, but for once in my life, I can be one of those people who says “You know the last month has been just hectic” and it’s kind of true.

Let’s see what I did in the last month:

I finally finished the huge, beautiful crocheted blankie for my dear sister who lives all the way in Japan and suffers terribly from the cold. To call it a labour of love would be an understatement – I’m not sure how many balls of wool went into it, or the final cost in South African Rands, but I can tell you that an entire box-set of the West Wing was consumed in the making of this blanket:

I’d never actually crocheted anything before but somehow the spirit just moved me. After spending most of this winter knitting, and trying very hard to be a responsible lady and live with the delayed gratification that knitting expects, I just thought that something a bit more immediate was needed. So crochet it was. Plus, I just love the cosy, retro, heirloom feel that you get with crocheted things.
And, lucky for me, the online craft revolution, which I consider to be the most wonderful collision of the digital and analogue worlds, came to my rescue. Thanks to YouTube videos, and the wonderful, talented, generous Lucy over at Attic24, I managed to figure it our quite quickly, and was hooking away in a couple of days.

I just love the way this project grew, from little teeny squares that took me ages when I started, but, by the time I was nearly done were just flying off the hook:

As you can see from the yellow one, in the bottom row, I was a bit wobbly at first, and things looked a little odd. But you can see the pretty flower pattern emerging quite nicely, and by the time I was joining them into groups of four, I was feeling a bit more confident:

I didn’t really use any logic in the planning of the colour combinations – I just kind of put things that looked nice together. But I did make sure that the groups of four had matching outer colours – otherwise, with some of those oranges and purples, it would have been a bit much. All in all, I’m very chuffed with how it all turned out. And, most importantly of all, Baby Sister seems to love it, and has said that she would rather leave her passport in Japan than leave the blankie there when she packs her bags to come home. So that’s a happy thought.

I’ve also just realised that as I’ve been sitting here, putting this post together and digging through my photos, I’ve found the source that inspired the colour choices I used. Remember a couple of months ago, when I uploaded the picture of the amazing ranunculi?

Well, looking back, I think this is where it must have all begun – these three little flowers. Which makes me very happy – I love the idea that, in deep, cold Japanese winter, my dear sister will have a little splash of South African summer sunshine.

Sjoe, but this post is long. You’ll have to read the next one, to see where else I’ve been.

Just Another Joburg Friday Night…

Anyone who has ever lived in Johannesburg will tell you that one of the things they love the most about this big, bad, wonderful city are the summer thunderstorms. Our winters are dry and cold, and summer is hot and wet, but unlike the tropics, our summer storms are violent rages of wind, rain and lightning. The rain comes sheeting down, battering the blooms off the jacarandas and smashing rose bushes. They’re also short-lived. While it might be bucketing down at 5pm, by 6:30 you can be sure that the sky will have cleared, the stars will be shining and the city will smell clean and fresh. Steam rises up off the hot tarmac on the roads, and the city is cooled.

Joburg summer storms are huge in every way – on windy afternoons dark clouds gather in the southwest of the city. By 4pm, it’s as dark as dusk and the only things on the streets are sheets of newspapers that get caught in the wind. We have to run around unplugging routers and appliances because, being right under the tower, we get struck by lightning almost every time.  This Friday we had our first massive hail storm of the summer, and it was a doozy. I was convinced that the swimming pool was going to overflow, and the roof was going to blow off.  The hail piled up calf-high, and it smashed the garden to pieces. My lovely mint, which grows in a tangle all over the front stoep, is non-existent. I couldn’t even scrounge enough for a Saturday afternoon G&T. The roses are in tatters, and I fear that my tomato and bean seedlings my never recover.

But when I went outside after that storm, into the cool of an after-hail storm, when it was finally peaceful, the whole garden was full of the most incredible smells -  of lavender and rosemary, from where the bushes had been stripped and pulverised. It was the real beginning of my Joburg summer.

Oh, and speaking of newspapers blowing in the streets – Joburg’s favourite son William Kentridge recently unveiled a lovely public work in the middle of the city, just over the Queen Elizabeth Bridge. It’s called Firewalker and it’s a sculpture of one of the many women who come into the city every day to sit on the pavements with a brazier, selling grilled corn and sometimes, smilies and half-smilies (goat and sheep heads). She’s beautiful, and so very familiar to anyone who has been in the city, but what I love about her the most is that, depending on the angle, she either looks like herself, or if you look from a different angle, the sheets of metal look like newspapers, blowing across the city streets.

I snapped her on my phone from both angles from the backseat of a car the other day. Isn’t she lovely?

From the front, and below, from the side:

See? Isn’t Kenty clever?

Bounty

Early summer in South Africa really is a wonderful thing. Especially in Joburg, where the sudden heat is mitigated by regular, wonderful thunderstorms, which wash the city clean, cool the air and make the nights tolerable. The heat and the wet also mean that suddenly the fruit and veggie shops are filled with the new season’s fruit and veg: September is broad beans, asparagus, the last of the blueberries, and the last small, sweet oranges of the spring. October sees prices coming down for my very favourite seasonal vegetable – the artichoke and the first crops of watermelon. By the end of this month (maybe early November, if the rain is heavy) we’ll be getting white peaches, and then the big yellow cling peaches, followed by grapes and nectarines and watermelons will be so cheap, you can afford to float them in the swimming pool to keep them cold.

So imagine my delight when we got a call from Manny and Dino at the veggie shop to say “come on down – artichokes are cheap!” they weren’t kidding. At R30 a box (about £2.50) I went a bit mad, and came home with three huge boxes. Aren’t they beautiful?

So most of Saturday was spent prepping all those artichokes. Some got eaten the traditional way – with most of their leaves on and melted butter. Others got stripped of outer leaves and chokes, and boiled in a water-vinegar mix, dressed with a vinaigrette and served up for Sunday lunch. The bulk, though, were stripped, cooked and frozen, so that in the dark, cold months of June and July, I’ll still be able to make artichoke and caper pasta, and dream of the bounty of spring…

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

You can imagine it, can’t you.  Two friends on a walk, arriving at a fork in the road and debating which way to go, left or right.  Apparently that’s the story behind Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken . Frost’s friend and walking partner, Edward Thomas, would get to the end of the walk and mutter that they should have opted for the alternative route.  In writing that poem, Frost was poking  fun at his mate.

I feel a little like that pair this morning as I write to tell you that I shall not be posting on Brixton Broads as regularly as I have in the past.

I have long imagined Earth turning off an alarm clock each weekday morning, putting on a suit and tie and saying, wearily, ‘Well, another day at the office, then’.  The result of that imagining is a new blog  called Earth at Work and, for the time being at least, I shall be concentrating my blogging energies on that.

This is by no means the end of Brixton Broads. I know Rebekahn has been plotting some tweaks to the site, so do continue to visit and look out for her posts.  And I’ll be here from time to time adding my two cents’ worth.

Thanks for reading  and commenting on my posts over the past eighteen months or so. Writing for Brixton Broads has been, and is still, tremendous fun.

Much love

Vivh

Dead Plant

This plant might be dead. My friend RocketMan thinks it is, and on Saturday, after lulling me into a well-fed torpor, he challenged me to bring it back to life. Now maybe it was all the fish I’d eaten, or all the wine I’d drunk that clouded my judgment. I can’t say. But I agreed, and with atypical braggadocio-style (must have been the fish) even suggested a wager. Now I’m stuck with a dead plant, which, I may mention, I can’t even identify. Any ideas?

I don’t really think it’s dead, in fact, I suspect it might be still alive. Deep down somewhere in the middle. So I’ve brought it to Brixton, and put it outside, under the apricot tree. I’m going to let it sit for a day or two, and get it’s bearings, and then I thought i might cut away all the dead leaves, and give it a hefty dose of vermicompost. If those tricks don’t work, I may move it to a bigger pot. I suppose it’s possible that the roots have gotten all clumped up and that’s why it looks so sad.
If none of that works, I might just give up this gardening malarky for good.

PS: The wager was supper at the oldest bar in Johannesburg where they make the best caldo verde in town. In return for successful advice, I’m sure we can find a way to spread the love….

Cough and Splutter

A heavy cold – and swollen glands that have given me a neck like Mike Tyson’s – in almost unseasonably hot weather today. Having to stay in bed on such a lovely day is heartbreaking. Colds are designed for winter. End of story.

Spiky Blue Things

Can anyone tell me what these spiky blue things are? I took this photo in the Brockwell Park Community Garden recently and,  coming from the other side of the world where plants are altogether different, I cannot make them out.  Not alliums, not eryngiums, not teasels, although they have the spikiness of teasels.  They’re not pincushions, either, but the name would certainly fit.

The Community Garden is an inspiring project that helps local youth get their hands grubby, something important, I think, if you live in a cramped council flat three storeys up. It’s a sign of age that I can type ‘youth’ so easily – I used to abhor the term.  One of these days I’ll go along and ask to spend an afternoon with them.  When I popped my head in a couple of weeks ago I found a motley collection of make-shift vegetable and flower beds – just the kind I love -  as well as a superb greenhouse that was ripe with the scent of growing things.  Here’s the notice board, which looks as every self-respecting notice board should: a bit of a mess.

And here, well, if I said this was a plant growing in a barrow of sorts I’d be pointing out the obvious, wouldn’t I?

For South African readers, those long brown things just behind the plant are old teasels.  In early summer they have lovely mauve- and lilac-coloured flowers.

So, suggestions, please.  Even if you don’t know the name of the spiky blue things, what do you think they should be called?  Don’t hold back – this could be the exciting beginning of a whole new Brixton Broads nomenclature.