My name is Grace and I’m a GlobalGiving Ambassador by way of Net Impact.  My friend Flavia and I recently took a trip to visit the project listed as “Capacity Building: Urban Farming and Gardening” in Cape Town, South Africa from Nov 24- Dec 4.  This is the second in a series on some of the accounts from my trip.

Thursday, November 29, 2007 

SEED is an offshoot of Abalimi that teaches permaculture to schoolchildren in the townships and have helped plant gardens at many schools. We were scheduled to meet with SEED and shadow them for the day but due to an unforeseen meeting we were not able to make the rounds with them and just met with a few members of the team, like Talfryn and Leigh. Instead, we headed back downtown for some souvenir shopping at Greenmarket Square.

Afterwards we arrived at Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens–”The most beautiful garden in Africa” my souvenir shopping bag says. It was already 4pm, and the sky was so overcast, we almost didn’t enter, but decided that our time in Cape Town was too packed to not try. I’m so glad we did! It reminded me of the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx.

No more than a few steps into Kirstenbosch, we ran into a girl we met from SEED! It turns out the important meeting that preempted our visit with them was held in Kirstenbosch! She picked a leaf off a Spekboom plant and offered it to Flavia who popped it into her mouth before I could say “uh, maybe that’s not a good idea.” When she said it tasted like a plum, then I had to try too.  The part of Kirstenbosch that was perhaps most interesting was the medicinal plants section so I spent some time educating myself.

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Tags: cape town, globalgiving ambassador, greenmarket square, kirstenbosch botanical gardens, SEED, south africa

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 9:53 am by Grace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.