Variety is the spice of life

The drawback is the Second Street Extension race track and Churchill Road potholes.
Coffee shops  and small retail outlets are constantly springing up – especially on Maasdorp Avenue, fast becoming a boutique strip.  Spacious old double storey homes now house all sorts of shops, mostly focusing on home and garden. The Shamwari coffee shop is closed – I was meeting someone there last year as the Sheriff of the court turned up to remove the furniture virtually from under the patrons! No new coffee outlet yet, though the proliferation of signs indicates plenty of other shops.
Down the road, Bottom Drawer is open for breakfast, coffees and lunches and the pretty, laid-back garden usually has a spattering of customers. I gather lunch can take a while – so it is more popular with ladies of leisure rather than the business set. I enjoyed a bodem of filter coffee – US$2 for more than two cups but the capuccino  could have been richer. The test for supreme froth is how long it takes a sugar sprinkling to sink through and mine disappeared very qui-ckly. I don’t think it would have held one of the gorgeous designs – the hallmarks of the capuccino baristas.
No time to eat on that day but the menu looked fresh and appetising and specials included blueberry muffins and lunch time ginger chicken.
The Bottom Drawer shop offers home décor – duvets and linen, basic white crockery, kitchen ware and some Woolworths food products. Not a huge variety but good quality and the place seemed busy, especially in quiet January when most of our pockets are emptied.
Wednesday morning sees 12 Maasdorp – right next door – turn into a food market. Regul-ars include Peter Pipers for pickles, chutneys, home gro-wn vegetables and free range eggs. Organic vegetables from Pangoula and lovely jams, chutneys, honey and tasty tomatoes from Diane’s Nyanga Farm. I bought good free range chicken too.
Inside is more home décor – cushions, curtains and bed linen dow-nstairs – and ups-tairs three shops – an accessory shop, a luggage outlet selling Cellini’s and Polo pieces for close to South African pric-es and a whimsical pewter shop offering platters and spoons and outdoor garden pretties.
Opened last year on Churchill Aven-ue in another elegant double storey,
The Olive restaurant has proved very successful and is constantly busy throughout the day with good fresh food.  Antiques and designer clothes hold sway on the ground floor and upstairs is the Attic book shop.
Round the corner on Normandy Road is Two Spoons  which in addition to a shop advertising wrought iron furniture and yet another coffee shop – is Eric ‘the Wormman ‘Harrison. 
I have long been wanting to produce the ‘black gold’ of the compost world and visited Eric to find out about worm ‘farming’. He has a regular production going on round the back of Two Spoons, and I bought a box of about 200 worms in compost for a hefty US$20 to get my own vermiculture project underway.
My Dad, who has taken up carpentry in his retirement, constructed a tower of boxes for me and the worms went into the bottom one. A fierce rainstorm helped most of them escape into the ground on the first weekend so its taken a while to get going.
Worms apparently eat 50 percent of their body weight each day, converting rough compost and vegetable waste into a rich organic fertiliser. I am still trying out this venture but hoping for good results in my garden. Watch this space!
– g.jeke@yahoo.com