Vanessa Bristow: a bird's guide to baobab trees

Baobab trees and animals often spend time together. Here, Vanessa Bristow reveals through her quiet, observant lens, a bird’s guide to the baobab tree

2016 Aug: The Little BIG BAOBAB Book

Inspired by her PhD research on baobab trees, Dr Sarah Venter wanted to make the fascinating information usually available only in obscure scientific papers, available to a much broader audience including children. The Little BIG BAOBAB book is for everyone who loves baobab trees…

World Water Day: when in drought, consult a baobab tree!

As some of hardiest, long-lived trees around, Baobabs know how to make the most of scarce resources, especially water. On World Water Day, when we’re bringing awareness to one of our Earth’s most precious resources, what lessons can we learn from Baobabs?

The Marvellous Brewers of Marula Beer

Each year marula beer connoisseurs make their annual pilgrimage to the far reaches of Limpopo to visit their favourite master brewers of marula beer. It’s a womens’ traditional craft and in order to get a taste of each woman’s brew you need to go ‘homestead hopping, visiting one home after another. Each one is different and this year Sarah Venter did her own tour of marula beer mavens and found out a few secrets along the way.

The Mysterious Life of Baobab Flowers

How are baobab flowers pollinated? It’s still a subject for considerable research and Nisa Karimi has been studying baobab flower pollination in the Limpopo area.

86 Years of Measuring Baobab Trees!

Skelmwater is a bare stony hillside dotted with baobab trees, but this has become a special place for Sarah Venter and Diana Mayne.  The baobab trees here are each numbered and painted with a neat stripe around their girth.  The girth of these trees has been measured since 1931.    Diana and Sarah discovered this plot in 2002 when they first went to visit it and found that the measurements had been forgotten and no one was measuring them any more.

EcoProducts Celebrates A Year of Growth!

It is always a happy and vibrant day when we all go out to celebrate of a year of hard work. So much has happened for EcoProducts this year: moving to new upgraded factory premises, getting HACCP certified – two huge events! Last year we were 22 people and now we are 50 people. So we have doubled our staff and have TREBLED our production output!

EcoProducts & Abalimi Harvest of Hope

We were delighted to join forces with Abalimi Harvest of Hope and have EcoProducts organic baobab powder added to their customers’ organic veggie boxes. Like EcoProducts, Abalimi Harvest of Hope works towards community upliftment through development and employment as well as strongly supporting conservation and nurturing the environment through organic farming practices. We love the work they do and we thought you’d like to learn more about them here!

Baobab Harvesters visit EcoProducts Factory

EcoProducts invited 30 baobab harvesters from across the Venda area to visit the new EcoProducts Baobab Processing Facility in Makhado. The purpose of the visit was to show the harvesters where the fruit goes and what happens to the fruit once it arrives at the factory.  We also wanted the harvesters and the factory staff to meet and to discuss the collection and processing challenges, and how these can be overcome through better understanding of the process.