The gardens of my youth

An old-fashioned vegetable garden, hidden well behind the house, any house, carries no special luxuries. It is there just for the kitchen and the pantry – yours and those of the neighbours. Today, however, such gardens are a rarity, writes Dave Pepler.

house, which stood right on the street boundary, so one had to walk around it through a fyntuin to get to the real place of cultivation.

Every erf in Robertson had a leiwaterbeurt – its owners’ turn to receive their share of irrigation water – whereby streams of clear water from the Langeberg were carried by means of neat furrows and a complicated network of sluice gates. My earliest images are those of the water approaching, sparkling and alive, my grandfather and I barefoot, with spades in hand, diverting this water into rows of broad beans. There was the warm mud welling up between your toes, the smell of wet soil, the clean light of a Little Karoo afternoon… All this verged on the erotic.

I spent most weekends with Ouma and Oupa. I slept on the back stoep, and because the stoep door was left open during the night, the first light would fall on my bed. One slept lightly here, as my grandparents lived at