Why can we not have peace on the site in a period of goodwill is called for?

I stopped nasty personal attacks on most members and am even civil to Mozart and AO.

But then I spend some time in the garden at my house and it really is colourful and beautiful to see.

*   the more or less 100 clivia plants comprising different colours have flowered already;

*   some climbing roses flowered throughout the winter, but in the main the other roses started to flower as long as a month ago;

*   the pincushions and Proteas have multiple flowers;

*   the inca lilies are flowering and looks great;

*   the near to 500 gladiolas in the garden will soon start to flower and will be magnificent when they do;

*   the day lilies  and coloured arum lilies will be joining the gladiolas soon as well.

The rest of the flowers are mostly annuals and I have every type available in SA.   Also some rare wild indigenous lilies.  Amongst them is snap dragons of which some species are growing chin high in my garden.

So why not enjoy all the beauty of nature around us and be less vicious on the personal attack side on this site?

In the meantime the November tests are coming up and I hope all SH teams get the loyal support they deserve against the vain NH teams.   After that there is eight weks of peace before we start dealing with the SR next year. So peace - ladies and gentlemen - is what we need now more than anything else is peace and goodwill.   

Hard debating is fine, the petulant personal attacks drag the quality of discussion down. It's especially grating when it consumes an entire thread. It's boring to read and a drudge to entertain. 

Fair enough Mikey ,if people lay off me and mine Im fine with that ,

My family is the garden of my heart and its what gives me peace.

Rugby gives me joy and occasional  despair,90% more joy though  .

Very nice offer CleverMike, however I do have a mental image of a couple of blokes peering over the garden wall.

Who is the one-eyed chap ?

Good one JW !

Dont care much for his depth perception,some of us are lacking any sort of perception 

This is Riversdale - I have no garden wall.

Mikey ya gonna build bridges rather than walls mate ?

Yeah I hate actual gardening ,thats why I have a dude come and do it once a week .Does a better job than I ever could hes happy Im happy and yeah suck it monkeys !

I like nature, b ut I don't have the time for gardening. Not my thing. 

I don't have time for house cleaning or gardening. I have a cleaner that cleans my house, and my garden takes care of itself- as it only in summer it grows. 

Sorry I have assistants who take care of the house and the garden respectively.   I also have a person responsible for cooking.

So maybe I am fortunate in this  case.   I am no good as a gardener - for some reason whatever I plant dies.

However, it does not change the fact that I love the end result - the garden is beautiful.   We start the garden when I bought the house in 2015.  The garden is not fully developed yet - another two years and it would be near to perfect in my mind..     

Plants respond to energy, as Sound waves are converted into light. Very interesting topic. The net result, don't talk negatively to your plants about Meyer, Alberts, Morné, Frans etc. They also communicate via a network underground. So they'll warn each other when you are around. 

Talking the truth about those players' substandard performances in fact may just help in keeping the plants alive.  Will bear your advice in mind!!!!!    

...not so clever mike anyone can grow potatoes and the least you can do is plant some spuds for Xmas dinner ...you can't beat those new potatoes to go with yr Xmas turkey, although you might've left it a bit late to plant now... i would recommend Desiree, a great red variety of potato to be sure...in NZ we also have some very tasty Maori potatoes...love those sweet potatoes ( kumara) as well...gotta get yr hands in the dirt mate...you'd be surprised at the amount of people that don't even know where food comes from these days..

Sort of a contradiction to my earlier comment, I do actually grow medicinal herbs. It's had me thinking about self-sustaining. It would be fantastic to go off grid.

Learning about different plants and flowers and how they respond to one another is actually quite interesting. Very intricately designed yet balanced interconnecting relationships.

Brycy you would remember the old joke about whats brown and sings in the garden ?

Not Elvis Parsley.

Its Dame Keri Te Kumara !

Bluebok

As a struggling pensioner you gave me a really nice idea - in terms of the latest court decision I can plant dagga on site and sell off the proceeds - but the selling part will get me into trouble with the Police.   So maybe not.

I had a number of stories about dagga.   Before the start of a Municipal Council meeting in Ballito the Deputy Mayor said that one of her friends were dying of cancer and in terrible pain - which was relieved only when he drank dagga tea.   One of the Staff members got up and left the meeting.   He came back ten minutes later and handed the Deputy Mayor an envelope containing the sought after "medicine".

Another time was a top lawyer in Umhlanga.  He had a huge bush of dagga in front of his office and what he called a "Conservative Party Clock"  in his office,   The plant did not bother the Police - the Clock did.  How can a clock run backwards in time?

No worries Bluebok, I'm 100% clean. 

I've never taken any illegal substance, I've never smoked and have no history of alcohol consumption aside from a handful o f occasions. Just wasn't my thing. 

That must be IT then!

Drinking has a long tradition in the case of Western Cape and Southern Cape farms.    Being a descendent of one of the oldest  and most famous Southern Cape farming families there was  golden rules governing that tradition.  The family owned the farm Zeekoegat - near Riversdale and the rules were simple as to living and association with people.

The first rule was service to the poor and deprived in the Community irrespective of race and creed.   The second was strict social conduct and friendliness to people.   The latter however, became restricted to a class system and that was to my mind always unacceptable.  Only a limited number of families and people on  a certain professional and political level were acceptable to socialize with.

When it comes to  dinking the situation was that children from their earliest childhood were taught how to drink socially.    I used to joke that we children went from drinking mothers milk directly to win drinking wine.   Maybe not - but we were drinking a glass at wine from about the age of four with only the size of the glasses getting bigger until I left school.   I gave up drinking altogether  when I left Pretoria in 1974 and having been a very close  friend of a family where three family members  died because of alcoholism - I have rarely had anything to drink since then.         

I used to be a very good cook and when staying outside of Pretoria we used to have dinner and braais  attended by up to 50 people on Sundays every week and I did the cooking and food preparations.

When I left Pretoria in 1974 I decided on a farewell party and invited 154 people to the party held on the farm outside Pretoria.   Among the invitees were the Governor of the Reserve Bank, the Chairman of the Public Service Commission and  a number of Secretaries and Deputy Secretaries of Government Departments as well as the Chairlady of the Pretoria Woman's club.   However, there was a problem - to my horror 150 people accepted the invitation and I had to do the cooking.  

Incidentally the Party was a smash hit and some of the people attending years later asked me when I would return to Pretoria for another party like that.

However, I have done virtually no cooking over the last 20 years and has had ladies doing he cooking for us.   At present I have a Jewish lady living in a flat on site who does the cooking  and she is a marvelous cook.

Enjoyed your post Mickey. I grow a few tub herbs as an aside and we have a small garden with some native plants. My main interest is our lawn......it's taken me some time to have it figured so that now it's a deep greenish/blue in colour and roughly about 2 inches long. If I'm allowed a pat on the back it's the best in the street. Located on the edge of a suburban forest the habitat of  a variety of bird life(Rosellas, Lorikeets, noisy Sulphur Crested Cockatoos, Magpies)  and a host of other coloured birds there is also the downside of weeds. Three of them are noxious so it's a constant battle to keep the lawn weed free, at its worst I've counted seven different kinds at one time. There is also the problem of shadow created by 50 -metre+ trees surrounding our house. All the more reason why I'm mighty proud of what I've achieved with our lawn.

Denny

I am glad you are happy with your lawn.  Good luck in keeping it going.   

I went around Sydney and Perth quite a lot.   I did not see many homes with really nice gardens.   It seems to get more difficult the nearer one gets to the sea or the bay in the case of Sydney.

Just an superficial impression though.          

Denny

I am glad you are happy with your lawn.  Good luck in keeping it going.   

I went around Sydney and Perth quite a lot.   I did not see many homes with really nice gardens.   It seems to get more difficult the nearer one gets to the sea or the bay in the case of Sydney.

Just an superficial impression though.          

My lawn and my pool is up to.... The drought has had it's effects. My well point does not help, so I'll have some bore hole water carted in for the pool.

 Looking at indigenous alternatives to lawn. I've got enough plants left that seems quite robust, so I just need some alternative to the lawn I had under the shady sections of my garden. I have quite a nice patch of Buffalo Grass left in the sunny section, that seems to be coping well without watering .

What a stade old duffer rooItwIt Is after all!  

Beeno, that's what we call a "poephol" in Afrikaans, but there is no reason being so nice to Rooi, I can think of quite a few apt expressions to better word his worth.

Dont have much lawn .but I do have a huge yard full of native trees etc backing onto bushlamd .We have wallabies ,echidna ,pheasant ,a mob of up to a dozen bush turkeys ,snakes [ I dragged a 3 meter python outta my laundry last Xmas] koalas nearby and every Aussie bird you can think of .Oops forgot all the reptiles like goannas etc,all in Suburban Brisbane mind you.

Thanks to my significant other, we have some small fruit bearing trees. The figs are my favourite (fig jam). I'm not really into lawn, which is a good thing, as our dogs are not lawn friendly. Better you have a weed problem than two large hooligans tearing it up. 

The mal e likes to eat herbs, which is another concern. Have to keep certain sections fenced off. 

These parts can't compare to the wild life of Australia, but we do have khatul hakholot (sand cats), gazelles and salamanders etc. 

Well, Moz I actually did not call Rooinek a poephol. ...and mealy mouth is probably an apt description of my responses to Rooi lately.

I had no intention of another battle when I started this thread - fact is the idea was exactly opposite to that,   Please guys at least keep the peace when discussing innocent issues.