Easter weekend is here and many people are on the road. Some will be heading to a really funky event near Stanford in the Overberg called the Reforest Fest.
It’s a music festival with a difference. On Saturday morning the music stops and everyone heads into the veld to plant 10,000 indigenous trees, part of a project to re-establish the Uilenkraal forest. Isn’t that great? The Reforest Fest is an annual event organised by Greenpop, an organisation founded in 2010 by Misha and Lauren Teasdale. I like Greenpop’s mission: to restore damaged environments and inspire people to “get active, not anxious, about the future of our planet”. I asked my friend Liane, who loves the Reforest Fest, where Greenpop got the thousands of trees to plant. “Francois Krige. He knows all about forests and growing trees.” He certainly does. Francois and Melissa Krige, owners of the 50ha Platbos Forest Nature Reserve near Gansbaai, say Platbos is one of the largest remaining fragments of old growth forest left between Table Mountain and Knysna. Some of the trees are 1,000 years old. Most of this ancient forest was chopped down for timber and agriculture over the years and now it’s surrounded by land infested with aliens. Today forests cover less than 0.5% of South Africa. The Kriges’ main projects are restoring the forest, making firebreaks and clearing aliens. “Platbos Forest was our first restoration project, and now we’re moving on to neighbouring properties,” Francois said. “There are millions of seedlings growing in the forest, but very few will grow into adult trees. That’s normal, like men producing more sperm than is needed. So I harvest these seedlings and grow them at our Platbos nursery. After three years they are about 30cm and we plant them in disturbed parts of the forest.” Greenpop buys 10,000 of the little trees for the Reforest Fest. Now here’s the thing: most trees that festival goers plant will die, because that’s nature, but enough will survive to create a closed canopy, a dense “roof” of tree branches that help keep the ground moist and create shade for other plants to grow. Francois says you don’t measure success by how many saplings survive, but whether enough have grown to adulthood to create a closed canopy. “A closed canopy is what you want so you plant them densely.” Interestingly, Francois was a conscientious objector and did not want to be part of the apartheid government’s compulsory military service. When he finished school in the 1980s he went to Germany where he was granted asylum. He was offered the choice of working at the US Army base in Germany or working in forestry. Of course he took the forestry option, learned a lot, and later brought it back to South Africa. Liane says what she likes about Greenpop’s Reforest Fest is their focus on “get active not anxious”. “We have fun and at the end of the festival thousands of forest trees have been planted. There’s a lot of darkness about the global environment today and the Fest is like a light shining into the darkness.” Have a happy, blessed Easter.
