Pebblespring Farm

This is the story of Pebblespring farm: an exercise in Regenerative Design.

It is also the story of my wife and I who live in sub-urban Port Elizabeth, on the South East coast of South Africa. We have three children. This is the story of our quest to live a life closer to the land. A quest that is odd, given the fact that we live and work in the city and did not own a farm when we started this quest. This Blog sets out our step by step progress toward our goal since the end of 2008, when we first bought four "Quacker" ducks to keep in our back yard.

The cottage is very old. At this stage we can’t rule out the possibility that this is the oldest remaining house in PE.) The farm is 10 hectares in extent and comprises a unique combination of grassland, forest, marsh and stream.
The farm is home to the perennial spring which feeds one of the streams that run into the Kragga-Kamma lake. The property was was under threat of subdivision from a developer who sought to profit from the transformation of this property into a residential “Life Style” development. With great difficulty we bought the property because we see things differently and believe that the lessons we learn here will be of benefit to ourselves and to many others.
We learn from and build on the ideas of:
Alan Savory
Bill Mollison
Geoff Lawton
Joel Salatin
Sepp Holtzer
... And of course many others who have touched our thinking in some way.

Pebblespring Farm, is the remaining piece of land around the original farmhouse of the once expansive “Goedmoedsfontien” (roughly translated from Dutch as" Spring of Wellness"). Located 20 km from the PE CBD on the KraggaKamma road, it includes a cottage (derelict and abandoned when we bought the place) which was the original residence of the farm granted to Johannes Kok in 1816.



The name, "Pebblespring farm" is a nod to the Khoisan and what they called "Kragga Kamma" lake. The surrounding area that is named "Kragga Kamma" after this lake. One of the streams that feeds the Kragga Kamma lake has as its source the spring on the eastern boundary of our property.

The most reliable source we can find (Margret Harrodene) records the Khoisan translation for Kragga Kamma as being "pebbly waters". Our spring is at the source of a little river that feeds the "Pebbly Waters" so we called the spring "Pebble Spring" and the farm Pebblespring Farm. I love it! The name talks to the fact that this property would have been a centre of human habitation for a very long time before the dutch arrived an called it Goedmoedsfontein, in itself a beautiful name meaning "Spring of Wellness and Contentment".