People are strange! Jan had to come and remove the whole bio-gas installation from his old house, because the new owner did not want it! What is wrong with her! She could do all her cooking, fridge, and some lights on that, saving a bag of money. Jan was busy connecting all the rooms to the system for lighting, and now he had to remove it all!So at last one late afternoon, this doctor in Zoology arrived, in a brand new Chevvy truck, and she was small, and very, very thin, with hair cut as short as a man's. I sensed a difficult person the moment she got out of her truck, and strided with a very sure of herself attitude onto her new property.
I saw her come back out after a while, and unloading first some sleeping gear, and a kettle, pots, and a small electrical plate for cooking. So I went out to introduce myself, and found her very pleasant, not at all the sourpuss like I thought her on first laying eyes on her. Then she started unloading plants. It was like unloading the complete stock of a small nursery, as there were hundreds of small seedlings in trays, big enough to be planted out. Then out came bags with cuttings, and soon the whole yard in front of her house were covered in seedlings and cuttings. I was quite astonished, but I kept the old pose, and asked her if she wanted a cuppa, which she said no thank you to, but she then asked if she could keep her yogurt, milk and butter in my fridge, as she had of course no way of keeping it cool.
I watched the scuttling around with interest, and when she brought over her stuff for me to keep cool, she told me that she was going to grow veggies for the market. She wanted to use the barn as a small roadstall, and open it on Saturdays and Sundays, and sell her ware from there.
I told her that she could sleep in my bottom room, as she intended to camp in her house until her furniture arrived, but she was very adamant to sleep in her sleeping bag in her own house. The next morning she came to my house with a cooler bag, which she filled with all the stuff from the fridge that she needed for the day, as she did not want to bother me every time she wanted something.
The next few days was like a strange comedy playing off in her yard. I marvelled at the speed that she could work up with a large consignment of plants stacked up high in her thin arms, her little legs buckling under the weight, and wondered how she found her way through the small gate leading to Jan's old veggie patch, as she surely could not see a thing in front of her. She was like a very busy bee, buzzing around like mad, sweat running down her face!
I was wondering about the seedlings that she had brought from Natal, which had a subtropical climate, and with our freezing winter just around the corner, the chances of any of that surviving was quite slim, or so I thought.