Like most of you, we are also on lockdown here in South Africa. Most of the businesses had to close and the building works at the lodge had to be interrupted. Unfortunately, because of this the opening of Laluka will be delayed, but let’s be positive! South Africa reacted quite fast & firm on the pandemic and thanks to this the spread of the virus is being controlled quite well! Now some of you might be wondering what we’re doing!
I’m sure you can imagine starting up a lodge, any business for that matter, can be quite hectic. However, as everything is closed now, things are a bit calmer.
Yes, there is quite a bit of computer or admin work that has to be done but we like to do some active and hands-on things as well!
Every morning we wake up and taste the delicious creamy milk we get from our 3 cows. Nothing beats that!
But what surprised us the most is how much you can experiment with the milk. We started with different types of Cheese and Yoghurt, but we definitely proved our farming skills with our homemade butter!
We keep on trying out different recipes everyday so once you will be here, we will have finetuned them to perfection!
Recently we also celebrated the arrival of two new lambs to our sheep family. Both mothers and little ones are healthy and adapting themselves to the rest of the group.
With the new births, we started to milk the sheep as well and guess what, we made some delicious Ricotta cheese that we can’t wait to serve you!
Our chickens needed a little house and therefore we decided to build a nice and cosy chicken coop to keep them warm and safe from the lurking predators (Civets, Wild Cats, Genets, Jackals). We were very happy when one morning we could spot the first egg!
Hopefully there will be many to come.
As you can read, we have made several steps in our farming life at Laluka farm, but one thing was still missing: a vegetable garden! As long as we’re on lockdown, we can’t have our vegetable tunnel built but that didn’t stop us to start our project.
We started planting in old drums we are not using anymore in order to start germinating the different herbs & vegetable seeds. Once our tunnel will be completed, we will have the right space to move the germinated seeds and get fresh organic herbs and vegetables.
When it comes to experiments, you can be lucky and be successful or have some more challenges to reach your goal. That’s what’s happening with our beekeeping project! We’ve installed a beehive to attract a swarm of bees, but no luck yet.
Hopefully we will get some good news soon and be able to harvest nice honey next summer! In the meantime, if any of you have some tips or suggestions, you’re most welcome to share them with us and why not have your pot of honey ready for when you will visit us.
That’s it for this blogpost, we will surely keep you updated on our journey to minimize our ecological footprint & be as sustainable as possible with Laluka! We hope we will be able to continue with the building of the lodge next month and welcome you soon! In the meantime, keep healthy and safe!