Mellow Yellow

Tumi, Patch and Paris walked to the top of a little koppie with me on Friday morning to take photos of our sunflower fields. Coco started out with us, but she quickly disappeared into the distance howling after a rabbit or something like that. There is only a very short window period in which the sunflowers are at their best and we probably already missed it last weekend with the bad weather. February has been quite dry and hot and many flowers have started to droop so I could not delay any longer.

There was a fair amount of bundu bashing involved as we were not following a path and veld is dense with grass and wild flowers. Fortunately Tumi and Patch led the way, which gave me a tiny bit of hope that any snakes lying in our path would slither away before I passed… where snakes are concerned I’m still very much a city girl i.e. terrified!!! Paris (our blind dog, see How Paris ‘sees’ the world) stayed glued to my heels as we trudged up and down the steep mountainside. We were all exhausted by the end, but happy that we’d captured some images of the yellow landscape. Because of crop rotation, the sunflowers are not always planted in the same lands around our house so the views this year are quite a treat and worth all the effort, I think!

Starting the gradual climb.

View towards the west – a patchwork of mealies and sunflowers.

Wild red hot pokers.

Mountain views towards the South.

Tumi and Paris taking a well-deserved break – if only Paris could see the view!

More pokers.

Fallow land contours.

Up close on our way home.

Tractor setting off for morning duties.

 

Twenty one years on

I can’t believe it’s Thursday already and I haven’t yet posted photos of our weekend with my girlfriends from school – don’t know where this week has gone! On Tuesday and Wednesday Quentin and I were on a tour of farms in the district visiting other Boran cattle farmers and then we attended a course on Boran cattle farming. It was great to see other farms  and we spent a night at the Oranje Guest Farm near Fouriesburg, which is owned by a fellow Boran farmer. We drove past fields and fields of very beautiful looking summer crops (maize, sunflower, soya beans), with only the odd bit of hail damage in some areas. I’m slowly learning more about the business and how to evaluate a good animal, but I’m not quite as passionate about it yet as Quentin!

On tour with a group of Free State Boran club members.

Anyway, back to the weekend. We had a great time chatting and eating and just generally relaxing together. A weekend goes by so quickly, but it’s so much better bonding time than just sitting down for one meal as one normally would in the city. My friend Lucinda recently moved to a farm in KwaZulu-Natal so we had a lot to talk about. Twenty one years ago when we were still at school I don’t think either of us could have dreamt we would end up being farm girls, but such is the mystery of life! Briggie and Yoza both have beautiful baby daughters (Briggie is pregnant with her second child), but they are both still very much city girls.

Sinéad is a professional photographer so I thought I would use her photos for this blog post. She was the most energetic of all of us over the weekend managing to fit in 25 kilometers of running! She is training for a big trail running race later this year and could not resist the opportunity to get out on our farm tracks. In between all of that she was running after her three gorgeous kids, taking photos and giving Quentin some photography lessons. She is a real star and I admire her so much for leaving behind her corporate job a few years ago and pursuing her dream of photography, make-up, and art. Check out her website and blog to see more of her work (www.sineadbrook.co.za).

I think her photos of Vastrap are stunning and capture the mood of that afternoon perfectly, particularly since they were taken under challenging conditions. We set off for sundowners on Saturday afternoon just as bad weather was setting in with strong wind and splatters of rain. That scuppered our idea of having sundowners overlooking the sunflower fields and we had to find a more sheltered spot behind the koppie instead. While the rest of us were carrying children and cooler bags, Sinéad was lugging her camera and tripod through the veld. Enjoy!

Kids on the back of the bakkie with sunflowers in the distance.

My babies.

Madame Coco.

With my fellow farm-girl friend, Lucinda.

Traipsing through the long grass to sundowners.

Sunflower vista.

Dramatic sky and grass.

View from the koppie.

“Sundowners” without the sun!

Sneezes and sniffles

I’ve had a bad case of hay fever this week, which hasn’t been conducive to enjoying the gorgeous summer outdoors and finding inspiration for blogging. The farm is looking magnificent though. Our sunflowers have just started flowering and the grass on my walks with the dogs is waist-high in places. Not surprising that I’m struggling to breathe!

Cows swimming in the grass!

Cutie pie.

Somewhere over the rainbow…

We’re expecting a full house of visitors at Vastrap this weekend with a few of my very dear friends from boarding school coming to visit with their families. We were all together last year for our 20 year school reunion and it’s always such fun catching up and spending quality time together. The last time most of them visited was before all the changes we made to the house so there is a lot to show them. On the menu amongst other things: Vastrap leg of lamb, catawba grape jelly (see recipe here), home-made vanilla ice cream and summer squash bread. My zucchini plants are still producing arm loads full of large squashes every week and I am running out of ideas of what to do with them!

The garden isn’t at its best at the moment, but there are lots of new buds on the dahlias and roses. I managed to pick a nice bucket full of flowers to fill the house with colour for the weekend. The new dahlias are stunning with much larger flowers than the ones I planted last year, but their stems are still quite short. I’ve started to pinch off some of the new buds to see if that helps to develop longer stemmed flowers. As if the hay fever is not enough I was stung by a bee on the forehead yesterday afternoon whilst picking flowers. Ouch, that really hurt!

Hope everyone has a really great weekend!

Weekend flowers.

Dahlias and roses.

Flowers to fill the house!