Anyhow, getting your garden to grow and the type of plants to grow is a total trial and error thing, that is if you absolutely refuse to have a cacti and stone garden, soooo depressing, and definitely not for us. I am a child of fynbos and green mountains, winter storms and rain, summer sunshine and beautiful veldts, four definite seasons in a year and no blurring of the borders of the seasons please!
Having said that I am here and I have to make this town work and try my damnest to get a Cape Town garden growing in Swakop, working on it, working on it.....!
So just to proof that you can with not so much effort get a fairly decent garden going despite the odds I have taken pictures of the efforts in our garden (our little postage stamp of a garden, with its tiny green lawns, but they are green)!
This morning we had terrible east wind weather, caused by inland temperatures being lower than coast temperatures, or something to that effect I am told, and the poor people in Windhoek have been freezing their butts off this weekend.
Günther is, as I am typing here, slogging away at cleaning the mini sand-dune in front of our front door and the sand which have blown into the garage and covered basically everything and that after we had the gardener here yesterday cleaning up everything so nicely, talking about throwing your money down the loo (filled with sand)! If you should leave this town on its own for a year it will be covered in sand dunes and no sign of human habitation in this area will exist, that is just my perception of the whole sand thing. I do not so much mind the east weather as after the horrific sandstorm, the afternoons are spectacularly beautiful, wind still and hot and sunny, it feels like you are in the middle of summer.
In this little postage stamp garden of ours we have quite a number of plants, my sweet-peas are flowering for the first time since I planted the seeds, I was beginning to despair that this is yet another flower which will just not grow in Swakop, but I decided to just leave it and now it is flowering. Just look at the beautiful deep pink colour.
We had lavenders in Cape Town and I remember reading somewhere in a book about Provence that lavenders like hot coastal areas so I was convinced that they will grow here (7310016) and I was not disappointed.
The ficus tree seems to grow anywhere, and it is green!. The sunflowers are not planted on purpose, they are from the seeds that we give the finches, mossies and doves coming here every morning and afternoon.Günther has found a rock with a natural hole in it as waterhole for them and they are loving it, bathing in it when they come to eat. 
I have a Mozambican fern in the pot on the stoep, this fern is my special pet, I nursed it for months and at some stage began to believe that it will never grow, till one day months later the first leafs came out and now there are a couple of new leaves coming out. Hope does not despair! This fern originated in Mozambique, my aunt in Johannesburg sent it to my mom by post, something they did all the time. In April when I was down in Cape Town I took a piece of the fern out and planted it, two different type of ferns, one Cape mountain fern and the Mozambican one. The Cape one did not make it (hope that is no sign about anything Capetonian), will have to get a piece of that again) but this one did and I am so pleased. 
I was told by a friend's husband (Jenny McCourt) on how to grow clivias from seeds, and I took the seed from our clivias we planted in Cape Town and planted them (quite an interesting process the planting and growing of clivia seeds), I literally looked at the bowl every day to see if they were growing and was rewarded by little white roots shooting out from most of the seeds after only a couple of weeks. I planted them first in pots and then transferred some to the garden bed (the only one we have) and what a drama, Mitzi scratched them out all the time when he used my bed as a toilet! I could throttle him, but finally it looks like some of them are surviving and getting more leafs (I just pray Mitzi does not dig them out again, they are really doing so well now). I also have two in pots which seem to be doing really well, my concern is that it may just be too hot here for it, so will see how it goes in summer (7310006), have not really seen them anywhere here, so it may be a first!!
My lemon tree is doing well, although at the moment I do not know if it gets enough sun for its fruit, they are still very small but they may just make it who knows, he is full of flowers and once the leafs fall off I have tiny little fruit left behind.
They always say a healthy garden is when you have beetles, bugs and other friendly bugs in your garden, well our garden is full of Mai Käfer (ladybugs) and bees and all kinds of other little bugs. May be because we refuse to use chemicals at all. I have bought a lovely pink creeper, not so sure about the name, but they seem to do quite well in Swakop, winter or summer, always have lovely pink flowers on them, it is still small so will have to see but new leafs are starting all over - that is the sign of life, right?
Then there is the arum lily but this one is really cute,
they are the small ones, almost half the size of the big one, did not even know you get that, it seems to be doing well in the pot in the spot where I put it as it is flowering beautifully so happy with that one. I bought a grenadilla tree so that it can creep up the walls and I will get grenadillas, well turns out the grenadilla tree was not a grenadilla tree after all!
I was a little suspicious as Mrs Woermann has one in her garden and the leaves looked totally different from what I had, anyway one day Gunther called me and said he just wants to tell me that my Grenadilla tree is growing big green peppers,
never even noticed them, so now we are harvesting lovely green peppers, the little tree is full, well it has truly made up for not being a grenadilla plant.
A maiden-hair fern I bought refused to grow in the house so I planted it in the "bed" and it is flourishing growing big, I just hope it will survive through summer. My creeping rose is not doing so well I don't know if it is because I have it in a pot or whether it is just not the right climate, it is not dying but it is just not looking that good. I will get it some rose feed and maybe a chemical treatment or something, I love those little roses and hope it will eventually show its character and grow big. I would love to have iceberg roses, but not sure whether they would work here, firstly where do I get them, this is Swakop!
Well up to know I have found out that green peppers really grow well here, lemon trees seems to do ok, ficus do well everywhere, arum lilies seem to do well if you put them in the right spot, those little yellow bushes also seems to do well, maiden-hair ferns do ok in the garden (winter that is), clivias grow but not sure how it will go with the growing up into beautiful flowering plants will go. Lavender thrives in sunny spots and lots of water, cosmos grows beautifully, Conifers in the right spot seems to do well.
I will just continue my trial and error basis, but I believe we have just about reach the limit with this little garden, next year we will be building our house, which is closer to the sea, and not as dry as where we are now, so who knows maybe it is a whole new process of learning and trying. I so love beautiful green gardens.! No cactii for me please!
Till next time.
Here everyone is well prepared, with wind shelters, umbrellas, tables, chairs, fridges and everything, we normally just take the necessary, but even we are starting to collect more and more to make it comfortable out there, many people will stay over on the beach at night, but that I have vowed, I will not do.
During the name-giving stage I thought we should call him Hodini! However, in the end Günther decided it will be Mitzi! Unlike Tati (I know strange names for cats) who always was fiercely independent, this one wants to cuddle up inbetween us at night, first night I threw him off the bed a 100 times but he just kept on crawling back and I thought, eventually, for either of us to get sleep I will just have to let him sleep there, talk about pajama drill! 
I am now fighting with him as he is climbing on them and sitting on top of them, my poor yuka which was growing so beautifully he seemed to have taken a liking to! 
Boy, the budgie also had to look out because he would run up to Boy and bump his cage but a couple of times' shouting and chasing soon made him realize that boy is not to be played with - one thing about this cat, he learns very quickly, a very very bright kitten. One day we put him in the bedroom and closed the doors as the painters were busy in the lounge, next moment we heard someone opening the door and out came Mitzi looking at us as if to say how can you lock me up - so now we lock doors! In the two weeks that he has been here he has crawled into our bed and our hearts, being alone at home he drives me mad at times but he talks all the time. He had his little operation to make sure he does not go and wander around and his shots, it is the one thing the SPCA actually insists on, soon Mitzi will have to go for another round of shots costing us a total of R600 on medical! Who said cats cost you nothing!
The best time was when they came to lay the lawn, now for those who have been to Swakop, you will know that greenery is a luxury, what with the shortage of water and desert all around, mostly you see browns and beiges and it gets to you! 
Both Günther and I love green lawns, they day they came to lay our 30 square metres (front and back) the two of us had huge smiles, we could not stop looking at it, at present the lawn is lovely, Günther waters it religiously twice a day. The wind here dries everything out and you have to, yet you have to be careful as water is quite pricey here. They have sewage water that you can use for watering lawns, etc. only but where we are that water is not available, so we are grateful for the postage patch lawns we have. Never have I thought so much about the miracle of greenery, God surely knows what he was doing, it is so soft on the eye and the most beautiful thing - ok I know I am going on about it but when you look around you in every direction, it is just desert sand - ABSOLUTELY NO GREENERY! The town obviously has gardens, palms, etc. but other than that we have sand - lots of it!
So we are settling down nicely - a bit of bad news, however, is that Günthers mom had a stroke, she is 85 and we had to put her into frailcare at Prinzessin Rupprecht Heim, a lovely frailcare facility, the gardens are amazing for Swakopmund, a real English type garden, with poppies, cockleshells, kappertjies, roses, you name it and it is growing there, it is so beautiful and i could not believe some of the flowers growing there. The care given is also very good and we know she is well looked after, we do not know whether she will ever get better, she is lame on the righthand side and cannot talk, but she does recognize us, so we pray that she will get better and hope that she does not have too much pain. All this makes you think about the fact that we will not be young forever. Edda and Gerd came up for the week to help sort out all the papers, etc. another thing that made me realized one should be prepared!
