Mr Christian Daniels, a technician in the Department of Horticultural Sciences on the Cape Town campus, received a special award for exemplary service and dedication to duty by the Faculty of Applied Sciences. The award was handed over by Prof Lionel Slammert, Dean of the Faculty of Applied Sciences.

Mr Daniels, along with his wife, Naomi and 10-year old son, Lance managed to contain and extinguish a fire which began on the properties surrounding the Cape Town campus. This was after he received a telephone call from the University security to inform him that a fire was headed for the campus and could potentially harm the nursery complex. The fire had already spread onto the south-east corner of the university and threatened to destroy the entire nursery complex on 24 December 2005.

Due to the fires which were taking place on the Table Mountain, the City Council Fire Department was unable to assist him. Mr Daniels then decided to take it upon himself and his family to attend to the fires.“When my family and I arrived on campus we discovered the fires already entered the nursery area and had engulfed many of the trees, irrigation pipes, and structures outlying the glasshouses. At one stage the glasshouses and the propagation tunnels were also under threat,” said Mr Daniels.

The fire was fierce due to the dry weather conditions and a south-easter blowing at more than 100 kilometers per hour.

After more than five hours Mr Daniels, his wife, son, and two security guards managed to control the fire before severe damage was done to permanent structures.

Due to the university being closed, Mr Daniels was unable to obtain immediate funding for material and labour. He made use of his own resources to do the most urgent repairs in order for the irrigation system to be operational once again.

After their brave efforts in helping with the fire, his wife and son also lent a hand with the repairs.

The award confirms the gratitude of the Department, the Faculty and the University for their exceptional courage in the face of danger, and exceptional loyalty and dedication to duty in ensuring that the irrigation system was re-activated and no plants were lost due to the non-functioning of the irrigation system.

Written by CPUT News
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Motivated by CPUT’s resolve to conduct research that seeks to address society’s challenges, CPUT academics are collaborating with herbalists to validate their work.

Prof Learnmore Kambizi, a lecturer in the Department of Horticultural Sciences, is leading a team of academics and postgraduate students that will help the herbalists establish and maintain herbal gardens as well as cultivate some medicinal plant species that would not ordinarily grow in the Western Cape.

They aim to do this done through hydroponics and tissue culture techniques available at CPUT.

Kambizi was invited recently to speak at a well-attended seminar convened by the Western Cape Inyanga Forum in Mfuleni, where areas of co-operation between Cape Nature, the Department of Health, academic researchers, local authorities and registered Traditional Medical Practitioners were discussed.

He says the academics decided to work with herbalists as they are custodians of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS), which they, the academics, intend to document to ensure that such valuable knowledge is preserved for future generations.

To sustain this research project and support postgraduate training he has been awarded funding to the tune of R1.5 million for three years by the National Research Foundation (NRF).

“We conduct a wide array of bio-assays on various medicinal plants (both pure and crude extracts) to assess their curing potential and toxicity,” he adds.

Steven Mapfumo, a doctoral candidate involved in the project, says the link between academic work and IKS is very important. “Western medicine is marketed as the cleanest and most effective medicine, but previous generations, which relied on plants lived longer when compared to the current generation.”

Sibusiso Xego, another PhD candidate, says her passion for herbs was inspired by growing up in a home where there were traditional healers. “We are taking the knowledge from the community to the lab and from the lab back to the community.” 

Written by Kwanele Butana

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At least 40 community leaders from the Western Cape recently became the latest beneficiaries of a service learning project, offered by the Department of Horticultural Sciences.

The Department received the community leaders on 23 September 2009 at the institution’s nursery on the Cape Town campus, where they were trained by Horticulture students in various horticultural techniques.

The project targets various communities from previously disadvantaged backgrounds. Most importantly, it trains leaders who are involved in community development.

According to Dr Michael Young, head of the Department of Horticultural Sciences, they have been running the project for several years and their aim is to train trainers who will go and plough back into their communities.

The Department works with communities that are involved in soup kitchens and related projects. The objective is to help these projects to become self-sustaining and for example, to never run out of vegetables.

The Department also works with schools, health centres and crèches from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Dr Young said: “Our main aim in this project is for these leaders to learn good gardening practices through interaction with our students. By doing this we believe we are playing our role towards poverty alleviation.”

So far, the project has attracted people as far as Grabouw.

The project does not just help feed the communities, but has also created jobs in certain communities.

“There are now entrepreneurs who earn a living through what our students are teaching communities,” said Dr Young.

Citing the community of Belhar as an example, Dr Young said community leaders from Belhar have grown tremendously and have also managed to run businesses out of what they learnt.

The Department issues start-up kits to all the attendees to give them an opportunity to start their own projects.

The institution’s Service Learning Unit, together with the Department of Horticultural Sciences, has assigned representatives to visit various communities and identify those who are in need. These communities later benefit from the service learning project.

Lucienne de Villiers, a Horticulture and Landscape Technology lecturer, said: “The service learning project is a wonderful initiative as it benefits the communities, staff and students.

“Also, this is unique for students. There’s a lot of learning on their side.”

Applied Sciences’ Faculty Dean, Prof Olalekan Fatoki, also visited the nursery while students were embarking on the skills transfer project.

“We went to visit the nursery with our Dean, Prof Fatoki, and he was extremely moved by the way our students interacted with the community leaders. He was visibly impressed by the initiative,” Dr Young concluded.

By Andiswa Dantile

Written by CPUT News
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 Taking care of the environment is one of the crucial aspects of life. As such, the Department of Horticultural Sciences recently hosted a workshop at the department’s nursery at the Bellville Campus aimed at teaching community members about sustainable gardening, improving their gardening skills, and beautifying their area.

The two programmes, Horticulture and Landscape Architecture from the Department of Horticultural Sciences, have done a vegetable garden and landscape design for the Good Hope College (Kuils River) in 2022. Yonela Matanzima, Lecturer: Horticultural Sciences, said: “We realised that we cannot always do things for people as we will not always be there. That is how the idea of the workshop came about. We saw that there were skills and knowledge that we could share with the community.”

Matanzima stated that the workshop's purpose was to improve the community members' horticultural skills and landscape maintenance and to learn more about organic feeding, the benefits of feeding crops organically, and pest control using organic methods. The learners from Good Hope College were brought in to learn how to grow their own food and to take care of the plants.

The topics discussed during this fruitful session were organic feeding and pest control, turf grass maintenance, and the importance of pruning and pruning techniques. Landscape Architecture third-year student Siphumelele Chuma delivered a presentation on turf grass maintenance. Matanzima lauded Siphumelele, who was very confident and knew a lot about the subject. “This shows that the lecturers are doing a great job.” He was able to answer questions from the audience without the assistance of a lecturer. The guest lecturer, Alex Duff from Spectrum Marketing, shared his industry knowledge with the students and the community.

“I am proud of a job well done as this shows that we can be agents to our local communities. As a Workplace-Based Learning programme Coordinator and [being] partially involved in Service-Learning/Community Engagement, I see the change we make around our communities. The students were very happy as they were exposed to different approaches of learning. They were given a chance to apply what they were taught in class and share it with the community.”

After the workshop, the community had an opportunity to tour the departments’ facilities.

This was a follow-up workshop following the departments' initiative in the community vegetable gardens with Dr Mandilakhe Naku, Service-Learning Coordinator, and the second-year Horticulture class and workplace-based learning third-year Landscape Architecture students. “We saw that there’s a need for sharing knowledge so that they can look after the plants that we were planting there,” Matanzima noted.

The members of the community who are also employees of Good Hope College enjoyed every moment as they were learning more about their plants and how to look after them. This Christian school focuses more on instilling Christian values in learners. “Taking care of the environment is one of their important elements. This gave them a chance to learn more. Being able to ask and hear directly on how to resolve some issues was quite beneficial,” Matanzima observed.

"Thank you for your thoughtfulness in including us in your field of expertise," said one of the community members, John Eager, who is also a teacher.

Matanzima added: In the future, I think instead of going out to communities and doing the projects for them, we better bring them in and teach them how it is done. When we leave after we finish the projects, we leave them without knowledge of how to maintain the plants.”

Written by Aphiwe Boyce
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