Your hosts, Linda and Peter welcome you to Puschka Farm.

 On Puschka Farm farm we  no longer farm commercially but still focus on self sufficiency and organic and permaculture practices.  We also take an active interest in regenerative agriculture 

Self Sufficiency

We have our own vegetable and herb garden and try to eat like “locavores” i.e: either our own produce or that which has been locally produced. 
We grow our own wheat and maiza from which we make our own wholewheat bread,pasta and mielie meal.

This year we bottled 250 bottles of tomatoes (just about enough pasta sauce for a year!) as well as some beetroot, beans, peaches and figs.
We also froze enough pumpkin, beans and onions to keep us going when we do not have fresh available.

We have chicken and turkey meat and beef from our indigenous Nguni cattle & have a few Dexter cows which we milk & make our own butter.

Our digester produces biogas from cattle and sheep manure. We use this for cooking and hopefully one day for electricity generation.

Sustainable Farming

After the last drought we decided that we would no longer plant garlic or other crops commercially. However we continue to run the farm alongOrganic, Permaculture and regenerative Agriculture principles.

We cannot use herbicides as other farmers do and thus must use hand weeding and inter row mowing.
We plan to use our Dexter cattle and our sheep to help with the weed and grass control in our olive orchard.

Fertilisers must be certified organic and these are expensive so we use a lot of manure from our own Nguni cattle, boer goats, chickens and turkeys.
We make compost and also use earthworms casts and we rotate our crops and use legumes such as cow peas as green manures.

Pesticides must also be organically certified but we also make our own from garlic, chillies and wood from the local cork bush.

Before the recent good rains, we focussed our attention on water harvesting and have implemented some strategies to save water.

We would like to become less reliant on ESKOM but that will take time as our power supply infrastructure is geared towards ESKOM usage
and to change it is going to be very costly.
We do however heat most of our water using solar geysers and "donkies" fired with wood from invasive trees on the farm (such as syringa)
and have replaced the electric geysers in our cottages (except Puschka House) with these donkies.

Apart from providing us with manure, meat and an income our Nguni cattle and Meatmaster sheep are used to help control bush encroachment.
They are good browsers and readily eat the new shoots and small bushes.