Friends of Free Wildlife

  FreeMe wildlife rehabilitation centre was a volunteer organisation run by a board of directors, a small core staff and volunteers. The volunteers were the main workforce behind FreeMe and their hard work and dedication has facilitated the care and release of orphaned, sick and injured indigenous wildlife. They founded FreeMe back in 1997 in…

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Sci-Fi Beehives: Smart Phones & Bee Messages!

  Bees are one of the most important animals when it comes to food production (a close second in my opinion after earthworms who supply healthy soil). Bees have been domesticated since antiquity; the ancient Egyptians depict workers smoking hives and collecting honeycombs in temple paintings dating before 2422 BC. Bee hives have taken on…

Solar Power in South Africa Part 3: Solar & Seasonality, Living with Solar in Gauteng, South Africa

How’s your Solar in Winter? (Author: The Economist) Solar articles written during the course of installation (2014) and 2015. Thus cost estimates for purchasing solar may be less (and you'll get better tech). Municipal charges have increased exponentially too! Winter sneaked up on our solar electricity system during July 2015. We hardly took notice of…

Sustainable, Productive and Economical Vegetable Gardening (Part 3): Integrated Organic Gardening

My vegetable garden is entering its 8th year and it has been a long journey of trial and error, many a dead or diseased plant and lots of research into various facets of food production along the way. As I have mentioned many times, organic gardening principles are not properly integrated and do not provide…

Solar Power in South Africa Part 2: Battery Basics, Living with Solar in Gauteng, South Africa.

 Global horizontal irradiation is the most important parameter for evaluation of solar energy potential of a particular region and the most basic value for PV simulations.The maps are free for public use, their reproduction and adaptation is authorised provided the following source is acknowledged: SolarGIS © 2015 GeoModel Solar Must know facts about Solar Batteries…

Green Manures: Cover Crops & Green Forage

I was actually researching green forages as alternative feed for chickens when I noticed there is a large overlap between green forages and green manures. Seeing that nothing is happening in the garden for most of winter I decided to look into green manures a little bit more in detail to grow during the winter…

Wormery: Earthworm compost

Worms @ Work Wormeries provide high quality compost that can be added directly to the garden, by decomposing kitchen left-overs. To start a wormery you require stacked containers (3-4 levels) and some earthworms. Most wormeries commercially available are expensive given the amount of space you get from it.   Wormery Construction We acquired some meat-slab/solid-crate…