Christa Stringer from the Deep South

As a young girl I grew up in the northern side of Pretoria on a smallholding. It was a beautiful piece of land with savanna vegetation. Tall grasses and Acacia trees. I often found myself spending time outside in the bush just walking, digging in the ground or playing with my brothers.

After school I studied nature conservation. I was blessed enough to find my first job at the West Coast National Park in Langebaan. That is the Year 2001. Although I desperately wanted to be a game ranger, my first job was to work as the environmental educator. I never knew I had a gift to work with children. Wow, what an eye opener.

From there on I went to live in Namaqua National Park in Kammieskroon, where I also worked in a much larger environmental education program with some international sponsors. I then came back to the Table Mountain National Park at the Cape Point section, where I spend the next 15 years. I got married and had my two children there and raise them in a tiny house close to Smitswinkel Bay. It was heaven on earth.

There we raised our two beautiful little girls who also loved the outdoors and playing in the Fynbos. Being so far away from shops, I decided that in order to provide some fresh, raw veggies for them, I would start to grow a few veggies from seed. I absolutely love growing anything from seed. I'm not always very successful but it brings me great joy to see something grow. My girls were always next to me sharing my journey of growing seeds.

Very soon after we planted our first garden, it got raided by the baboons. Every single little plant was not just harvested, but it was completely pulled out and destroyed and this was after hours and hours of lovingly looking after the veggies and spending time with my kids there. We were heartbroken. My wonderful husband, made us a veggie cage for our garden. He used all the materials that he had. We didn't buy anything but used old discarded fencing materials. We used old scaffolding poles for the structure because it had to be strong enough to keep the baboons out.

Spending time there in our veggie garden, being peaceful and everybody doing their own little thing to help, was the most special part for me and then for the kids to invite their friends in to harvest with them and enjoying the carrots and tomatoes made all the hard work worth it.

We were so isolated at Cape Point and without internet. I didn't have a support group to give me advice about gardening and how to do it in a Fynbos environment, but I had this beautiful little cookbook, Tuis Kos Uit Die Tuin (Home Food out the garden), by Sonja Jordt. It gave me all the information I needed to set up a small sustainable garden.

I got so excited about the new knowledge, and being an environmental educator, I was involved in the Redhill community where we had a few workshops with kids to teach them about veggies and how to plant and grow your own. We had nothing to work with except the bare essentials but everyone had a bean and a carrot growing somewhere. In my work at SANParks, I concentrated on environmental education about the Fynbos and Marine environments.

I worked with various very large school groups at a time and it was more towards the end of my career with SANParks that I started working with homeschoolers. My groups were smaller now and I would do more in-depth studies about our topics. I decided to leave SANParks in 2018 and start my own business. My Hoerikwaggo Kids programme for homeschoolers, and then special groups that are more for conservation- minded children, Cape Town Rangers. The groups quickly grew into about four groups and then Covid hit. After Covid, I basically had to start from scratch again, but from the year 2020 up to now, the groups have grown to 12 group different groups of about 25 children in each.

Each month, we have a specific topic, from marine and Fynbos to forests and streams. We study one topic a month through a digital lesson that the mums do at home with them and then a practical lesson where we meet outdoors and explore.

Coming from a SANParks environment where I was steered by a lot of rules and regulations, I really enjoyed the freedom of doing education outdoors. I can still remember a comment from one of my clients that really took the reins off of me. She said, ‘Blessed is the flexible’. Oh my goodness, how that changed my life. I didn't realise I was putting such high expectations on myself and that was kind of sucking the joy and the passion out of working in nature.

Now I just take each day as an absolute blessing to be able to spend outside with children and to open their eyes to the awesomeness of the design and workings of nature. It is probably one of my favourite things to see that ‘wow’ moment on a child's face. The homeschoolers really opened my eyes when it came to seeing what we can do at home with our own children. They are exploring their own gardens to find nature. They are making changes in their homes to be more sustainable and their holiday trips are full of nature exploration.

Since I left SANParks, we moved to the suburbs and I now live in Capri where I have invested most of my time in creating a Fynbos garden from scratch. I have also decided to create little patches of forest and freshwater ecosystems and even a little piece of Karoo in my garden. To have this kind of diversity in my garden just brings me absolute joy.

My girls are teenagers now, but I often find them sitting on the deck or next to the pond, enjoying the spaces mamma created for them. I don’t have to take them there anymore. They enjoy it and find peace there. Having a full-time career for most of their childhood, I feared that I didn't have enough time to teach them the things about nature and how to connect, but just being around me like my two little lambs, and seeing what I was doing, did the job. It is part of them now. They know where to go to pray and find peace.