Bon Tempo

Our little farm is on top of a small hill in the beautiful Manley Flats valley just 20 km from Grahamstown. We have lived here for more than 10 years and eco-art, using glass bottles and various other materials, and the priapic garden have become the characteristic features of our garden and home. We are farming with honey bees, quails and chicken and keep a group of zebras and some buck. The grassland with acacia, aloe, euphorbia, trees, shrubs and herbs slopes down to dense riverside thickets. Wild animals living in this area, besides the ones that we keep, are small buck, bush pigs, jackals, caracals, genet cats, aardvark, jackals, porcupines, baboons, small monkeys, huge land tortoises, iguanas and other reptiles, and a vast variety of birds ranging from the African fish eagle to minute sun birds, not to forget the arthropods – the quiet observer might just be lucky to spot several species of them.

The area around Grahamstown is one of the most diverse ecological regions in South Africa. Four different climate zones meet here and it is not unusual to have ‘four climates in a day’: the Karoo desert, the sub-tropical coastal belt, the Western Cape winter rainfall and the inland summer rainfall zones.