Kat & Tshepi

Hi There,

Welcome back to K&T blog. How are things on your side?

Things are good on our side, we are at the end of winter here in South Africa, it is still discouragingly chilly but it is starting to warm up. Seeing that winter is coming to an end, we started to review our fitness and weight loss efforts for this foregoing winter. We entered winter with a weight loss plan because we knew how terrible this season is in reversing weight loss gains. We logged and tracked our efforts on this page , and by the look of things we lost roughly 1kg each. This is not a lot but we are content with this loss because it happened during the hardest season to lose weight. Gaining weight is a norm in winter and the average weight gain is between 2 – 3.2 kg’s, so losing anything during this season is a win 🙂 as the odds are against you.

Earlier this month we started our vegetable garden, and we thought it would be a good idea to keep providing monthly progress updates on this blog. In 2023, our garden flourished and we enjoyed eating fresh vegetables straight from the garden for a few months, we managed to grow the vegetables with limited water and with restrictions of time. We stay in a village that does not have municipal water, to get water you either buy and get water delivered to you by tankers 😦 or you spend a small fortune on drilling a borehole to have adequate supply of water.

Where we stay, convenience does not come standard, you have to create it. You soon learn to be independent of the states services and start to think more and more of solutions instead of problems. Time was also a restriction for our garden to flourish ,it was a rare commodity as our commitments were always surpassing our available time , we had to figure out a way to keep the garden alive. And what worked for us was allocating 15 – 30 minutes per day to care for the garden, doing this consistently was key to success. Consistency always seem to be key to success in life, and more so in fitness and weight loss.

This year, we hope the garden will get bigger and better as we managed to drill a borehole and now have access to enough water. Time is still a constraint for us but hey we saw that 15 to 30 minutes per day set aside for tending the garden works, we will stick to that. Our garden is 90sqm and this year we plan to grow spinach, swiss chard, sweet peppers and various herbs, with a possible addition of beetroot, cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower. Our overall intention is to have a self-sufficient garden whereby we will be growing most of the vegetables that we consume on daily basis, we intent to learn how to do this and we hope that we will get there someday 🙂 .

The July Garden update: The 2 x 10 metre rows of Spinach we planted at the beginning of July is growing slowly, some of the seedlings seems stunted and dead but we can see life in them 🙂 . We suspect the winter coldness has been harsh on their development and growth, but it is getting warmer and the beauty of life is starting to surface. We have added two more rows of swiss chard last week, and these are growing much better but already we can see traces of visitors, the birds. Last year the kids had to create scarecrows to minimise the impact of the birds on the swiss chard, but that had little impact and we eventually had to cover the crops with a fish net, so we need to repeat the process this year.

That’s it for this week, as we enter a new season we are happy with our fitness and weight loss efforts for this winter and we are keen on starting Spring with a revived vigor that will keep and sustain our goals. Also, as we start our 2024 gardening journey, we are eager to maximise on aspects of our lives that we have control over , like the type of food we decide to eat. We hope that you are also ready to continue chasing your fitness and weight loss goals as you enter a new season where you are.

Until next week. Stay blessed.

Kat & Tshepi