The sweet cherry tomato 🍅
For months I’d been told by Yvette that I just have to meet this friend of hers. She would tell be about a greenhouse that he built, try to explain the intricacies of what he was doing while admitting that some things just went way over her head.
As much as those things went over her head when she heard it, I couldn’t make out what Yvette was talking about either. One thing I did get though was that he was growing his own food, and lots of it.
The reason this was such a big deal for me was that Chantal and I had bought a house a few years earlier and it had a big yard at the back. After years of pondering what to do with the space, and after the first few years of load shedding, I had been thinking of ways to go off grid at least in terms of electricity.
I did a couple of stints with EnviroVision in Sabie and Swaziland where I got to see the use of solar power and wind turbines so that was as far as I had been thinking.
Another thing that drew me to this story about a Yvette’s friend was that I had had a vision of a dome some years before. I didn’t know what it was about but it felt important.
You know how when you are bored and stay to doodle on a page? Well I think that’s how I initially got that dome vision.
After hearing about this guy who was growing his own food, a picture started forming in my head. That is vision came back to me and I decided to ask Yvette for his contact details.
His name is Caleb and when I contacted him, I wanted to meet and hear more about this story but I wanted to meet at the site so I could see for myself what it was all about. After all, what did I know about a greenhouse it any of this stuff.
And so we met at the greenhouse, but it wasn’t what I was expecting. Instead of a flourishing project, Caleb explained that the project is on hold.
People had been breaking into the greenhouse, stealing cables and stuff and as if constantly losing equipment wasn’t bad enough, he had been having problems with the landlord and needed to move out and find another space to do his thing.
While we were there, however I got to see something very intriguing. Although the pumps weren’t running and he hadn’t been maintaining it for a while I still saw a lot of growth, such a lot of food and you could just tell by looking at it that a lot of work went into building this Oasis inside a plastic building.
The one thing that stands out for me and that l always tell people about is the cherry tomato 🍅 he gave me to taste. I was still quite in awe of the project as even though I could see and listen to his story, I still didn’t really understand much of how it all worked.
The cherry tomato was sweet. Which was weird for me because normally a tomato (to be at least) is sour. It was the nicest tasting tomato I had ever had. It snapped me out of my daze of information overload and I asked Caleb if he had the time, we could go back to my place some 40km away and have a look at my back yard. I didn’t have much of a budget to pay him, but I did have a yard he could use to rebuild this project. In exchange I could learn from him and we could try and build some sort of business or arrangement from it where we could both benefit.
And so began my Greenhouse 1.0 which later became known as Pr0j3ct4lph4 (AKA Project Alpha).