The Stellenbosch Compost Con 🌱

A Stellenbosch resident recently agreed to have compost spread on the little patch of lawn outside their house. R90 a bag, including labour. Sounds reasonable.

The men said they were doing all the neighbours’ lawns, and having only recently moved into the area, she didn’t want to be the only person in the hood who hadn’t contributed.

The family is used to estate living. Now they’re in the hood. The neighbourhood. Where there’s no security gate, but apparently there is a R2,520 initiation fee.

According to her account, the men insisted she watch them empty the first bag. Very professional. Full transparency. A live demonstration of how a bag works.

She then went back inside, and shortly afterwards they called her out. Finished!

“How many bags?”

She thought about three.

They started counting the empties.

One. Two. Three. Four…

Ten…

TWENTY-EIGHT.

Total: R2,520.

Sorry, did you compost the lawn or fill in the swimming pool?

This is a small patch of grass outside a house. Twenty-eight bags should have raised the property enough to qualify for a mountain view. She could still see the lawn, and there certainly didn’t appear to be a small agricultural province’s worth of compost on it.

She’d gone inside as a homeowner and come back out as the sponsor of a land rehabilitation project.

She eventually paid R1,000. Then, having completed this outstanding contribution to the local economy, they had the cheek to ask for water.

Tsek!

And the claim about doing all the neighbours? She says that turned out to be nonsense too. The only thing being spread generously in that street was the story.

A little reminder: agree on the number of bags and the total price before anyone starts. “R90 a bag” sounds lovely until you discover the bags reproduce while you’re inside making tea.

Welcome to the neighbourhood. Your first lesson cost R1,000.

Jonkershoek is one of our favourite places to escape into nature, but Friday’s events were a sobering reminder that a beautiful hike can turn serious in seconds.

A 20-year-old Stellenbosch University student, hiking with five companions, slipped on wet rock near the upper waterfall and fell approximately four metres into Second Waterfall Ravine. Injured and unable to continue, he needed emergency assistance.

WSAR, Stellenbosch Fire and Rescue, and the EMS Air Mercy Service helicopter team came to his aid. With steep rock walls and a waterfall leaving little room to manoeuvre, the crew hoisted him out and flew him to hospital. Rescuers used ropes to help the remaining hikers descend safely. An enormous thank you to everyone involved.

His companions made the right call: they called for help. WSAR praised that decision and cautioned against trying to carry an injured person through difficult terrain.

Save 021 937 0300 before your next mountain outing. And remember: turning back still counts as a hike. The mountain will be there next weekend.

Wishing the student a full recovery.

Beyerskloof Wine Bar has successfully appealed an earlier judgment that held it liable after a woman swallowed a needle-like object while eating a hamburger at the Stellenbosch establishment. A full bench of the Western Cape High Court found that the customer had not proved negligence by the restaurant.

The case concerned an incident in October 2020. The customer initially won her case on liability in May 2025, but the appeal court found that the earlier judgment had incorrectly inferred negligence from the unexplained incident. The exact nature of the object and how it entered the food had not been established.

The judges emphasised that the burden of proving negligence remained with the customer. They found insufficient evidence that the restaurant should reasonably have foreseen the incident or taken additional precautions beyond its existing food safety procedures.

The court dismissed her claim and ordered her to pay the restaurant’s legal costs for the trial, applications for leave to appeal and the appeal. The ruling concerned liability, rather than the amount of any damages.

Fancy bringing a touch of Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen to your dinner table without having to explain a restaurant bill to your spouse?

The Michelin-starred South African chef’s JAN wine range, produced and bottled by Zevenwacht, includes a red and a white blend currently listed at R200 a bottle. A rather manageable way to get a famous chef’s name onto the table.

There’s a lovely local connection, too. Jan Hendrik credits long summer afternoons in Stellenbosch with sparking his love of wine. Clearly, those afternoons worked out well for him. Most of us just ended up with a favourite wine farm and an increasingly ambitious cheese budget.

And there’s substance behind the label: the JAN Shiraz Grenache Mourvèdre made the Top 10 in Wine Magazine’s 2025 Signature Red Blend Report, while the white blend earned 4.5 stars in the 2025 Platter’s Wine Guide.

So yes, dinner might still be spaghetti in yesterday’s Tupperware. But pour it alongside a bottle of JAN, dim the lights and announce that tonight’s menu is “a celebration of humble ingredients”.

Same leftovers. Much better PR.

You pick up your phone to check the weather.

Forty minutes later, you know how to grout a bathroom, why a woman in Ohio is divorcing her husband, and that a golden retriever can apparently say “I love you”.

You still don’t know whether it’s going to rain.

Dr Anna Lembke, Stanford’s medical director of addiction medicine and author of Dopamine Nation, warns that modern digital life is engineered to encourage compulsive consumption. And knowing how it works doesn’t make you immune. She has spoken openly about her own compulsive reading of romance novels, which escalated with the convenience of an e-reader.

Yes, even an addiction expert can get caught in the “just one more” loop. Your confidence that you’re above it because you watched a podcast about dopamine may need revisiting.

Lembke describes how repeatedly chasing highly rewarding experiences can leave us craving more while enjoying them less. Dopamine helps drive motivation and reward-seeking; it isn’t simply a little happiness juice that needs draining out of your head.

That might explain the particularly ridiculous experience of scrolling while thinking, I’m not even enjoying this.

Put phone down. Pick phone up. Open same app.

Like checking the fridge again, except the fridge has hired engineers to keep rearranging the cheese.

And then there’s the approval treadmill. You post a photo and check who liked it. Then check again. Then wonder why someone watched your story but didn’t react.

We used to wonder whether the neighbours liked us. Now we demand analytics.

The uncomfortable question is what all this checking costs us. Lembke warns that digital media can create an illusion of connection while crowding out the effort required for real relationships.

We say we don’t have time to read. To walk. To sit with our children. Then somehow find time to watch seventeen strangers reorganise their pantries.

Perhaps start small: put the phone away during dinner. Charge it outside the bedroom. Turn off the notifications that keep summoning you. Let a queue just be a queue.

You might feel bored. You might reach for a phone that isn’t there. You might have to make eye contact with another human. Terrible scenes.

You don’t need to turn your life into a silent retreat. But “I’ll use it less” needs something more concrete than a promise made with Instagram still open.

The feed never ends. Your time does.

Before you reach for your phone tomorrow morning, before the messages, the worries and the list of things that need doing, pause for a moment.

“How lucky I am to be here.”

You don’t need a perfect life to say it. You can be tired, uncertain or carrying something heavy and still recognise that waking up is a gift. Gratitude doesn’t ask you to pretend everything is good. It asks you to notice the good that is still here.

Somewhere along the way, being alive became so familiar that we stopped being amazed by it. We wake up and immediately think about what we have to do, rarely considering that we get another day in which to do it. Another conversation. Another chance to make something right. Another ordinary moment with someone we love.

We spend so much time wishing life were different that we can miss how extraordinary it is to have a life at all.

So tomorrow, let that thought arrive before everything else: How lucky I am to be here.

Then consider what you want to do with the day you’ve been given.

One day, you would give anything for one more ordinary morning. This morning, you have one.

🌤️ Tuesday: Morning fog clears to a partly sunny day. 21°C / 10°C

🌤️ Wednesday: Sunshine filtering through high clouds. 20°C / 12°C

⛅ Thursday: Partly sunny and pleasant. 21°C / 13°C

🌤️ Friday: A lovely, partly sunny start to the weekend. 23°C / 13°C

🌦️ Saturday: Cloudy and cooler, with a brief shower or two. 17°C / 12°C

☀️ Sunday: Mostly sunny, with a chilly evening. 20°C / 9°C

Friday brings the warmth, Saturday remembers it’s the Western Cape, and Sunday tries to apologise. Keep the braai plans flexible.

As always, thanks for reading. If you spot something in town worth knowing, reply and tell us. Half the best Stellenbosch stories begin that way.

See you around town,
Stellenbosch Brief

If you know someone in Stellenbosch who would appreciate this, feel free to forward it to them. The right readers tend to find each other.