THE LAND IS VERY BUSY DURING WINTER

Words / Photos: Kim M Reynolds

Before you first enter Veld and Sea, you would have driven around the Klaasjagersberg mountains in Cape Point, past the southern communities of Muizenberg, Kalk Bay, and Simon’s Town to arrive at an innocuous yet sprawling patch of land where Veld and Sea sits.

Its founder and lead educator, Roushanna Gray, would have welcomed you with a special tea blend specific to her, which is served to every visitor to Veld and Sea. I received this tea during a sunny Sunday visit this past July, as the Veld and Sea team curated a five-station wild foraging workshop, culminating in a large-scale lunch made with various things foraged and kneaded throughout the day. 

Founded in 2013 and fully operational in 2016, Veld and Sea is an experiential educational space that offers various courses, multisensory experiences, and workshops that centre on foraging and understanding the edible landscape of this particular area of the Western Cape, about one hour from Cape Town. 

The team of Veld and Sea hold a wealth of knowledge about this landscape, working as a collective of creatives and land and food practitioners. 

For Roushanna, nature is the penultimate classroom – it's a place to learn everything from gastronomy to astronomy. Roushanna was inspired to create Veld and Sea after observing her children’s heightened interest and enjoyment in food when they participated in the entire process of harvesting, cooking, and tailoring meals to their liking. 

As such, Veld and Sea was established on the land where she and her partner (who also works on the team) raised their children. 

Veld and Sea’s offerings follow the seasons. In summer, they offer coastal foraging by the sea. In the autumn, there is wild mushroom foraging. Spring is a time for picking and understanding edible flowers, and in winter, there is an opportunity for generous foraging of the edible landscape. 

Roushanna emphasises that winter is a season of aliveness: 

“In the global north, winter is a dormant season. And it's oftentimes snow and it's cold. We always liken our systems and cycle to the global north because that's where a lot of media storytelling comes from, but actually it's completely different here. And so what happens here, definitely in the Western Cape, is we have our winter rainfall season, and that means everything comes alive in winter. And while it can be a season of slowness in terms of cold weather, storms, and rain, there are a lot of things that are happening out there. It's actually the growth season, and the activity is wild and it's beautiful. This is when our green will grow and our indigenous vegetables will be around. In terms of wild flavour, it's abundant.” 

Winter is also a very fragrant time of the year. The immense diversity of fynbos in South Africa flourishes in the wintertime because the essential oils of the plants are able to grow and be nourished. In the summertime, the South Eastern winds alongside the sun’s heat strip the plants of their essential oils. As such, when you’re on a hike in winter, you will likely encounter a dense and potent scent landscape, as opposed to a summer's day hike where everything is much drier. 

During the foraging course, we learned a great deal about this edible landscape. While we walked along the grounds of Veld and Sea, we were instructed to cut and pick various plants, seemingly ‘weeds’, and herbs that we were going to use to make wild herb pesto and to garnish flatbread. We picked spekbom, which is high in vitamin C and omega threes, as well as lemon geranium leaves. We were also taught about the fynbos that grows generously in the area. There are over 8,000 species of fynbos that occur in the Cape Floral Kingdom, and many of these plants have been used in medicine and herbal teas for generations as part of indigenous knowledge systems. All of this foraging is possible and generative during winter as the land has the time and resources to expand and respond to cutting and pulling with more growth.

This level of responsiveness offers evergreen lessons that translate into the systems management that Veld and Sea have set up. The premises have several closed-loop systems, meaning there is close attention paid to managing waste, repurposing resources, and maximising symbiotic cycles. For example, there are grey water plumbing systems, meaning the water used in things like kitchen plumbing can be filtered back into irrigation systems. Leftover greens and roots used for cooking often go back to livestock like pigs and chickens, which in turn make nutrient-dense manure for soil and crop growing. A small herd of goats do the same, as well as graze along a designated line which maintains the property’s fire break. 

This same symbiotic consideration is given to how the team curates their experiential workshops. Our workshop began with a demonstration of creating fire ‘from scratch’, which involved creating an ember using tools and methods employed and created by the Khoi and San people who previously inhabited and stewarded the land prior to the violence and theft of settlers in South Africa. 

Fire and its invention and development were foregrounded as an immense developmental tool for societies, and also the vehicle for nourishment as it relates to cooking and preparing food. 

The next stations involved: foraging; wild pesto making with the greens foraged; a botanical mocktail station with various elixirs and syrups made with herbs grown throughout the premises; flatbread kneading and adornment with other foraged greens, and planting of nursed and fragile spekbom for the next group of visitors, which will have grown into fortified plants in one year’s time. 

The culmination was a large lunch that the team prepared on site during the workshop, including the cooking of flat bread, two stews, and wild green pesto as a garnish on the table. 

The experience Veld and Sea offers marries experience with knowledge, but also aims to mimic the truly symbiotic relationship with food and our physical environments that have been terribly disrupted by exploitative capitalist systems. This includes industrial food systems, exploitative labour sources, and the normalisation of buying several different, individually packaged items from grocery stores. Similar to the impending reliance on AI, the commercialisation of food systems has disempowered and disconnected societies from our food sources while equally degrading land and food quality at the same time.

Understanding and using multiple parts of herbs, foods, land, and waste management puts on display the interconnectedness of our physical environments. Contrary to our highly industrialised world, most environmental systems are built with everything we need in order to live regeneratively. There are, in fact, endless seasons of life to be lived, if we get the opportunity to learn, eat, and importantly reclaim. 

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More offerings can be found at https://veldandsea.com/ , including scholarships for women of colour to join seasonal courses. 

Veld & Sea – Inspired by nature, seasons, moon, and tide | Tel: 27 72 234 4804 | 7976 Plateau Rd, Cape Peninsula, Cape Town