HAENERTSBURG – Home owner Louise Claassen was a personal friend of Peter who hailed from Mokopane. When Peter (68) arrived at Louise’s home for some soup, she knew he was terminally ill. Peter had secondary liver cancer. Louise, together with two other women, nursed Peter until he died on the farm a month later.
The house, once a hangar that housed two Piper Navajo aircraft, was ingeniously converted by partner Gary Wilkinson into a spacious home with huge glass windows to let in an almost 360 degree panoramic view of the village and the Iron Crown Mountain.
Peter, who had neither wife nor children, bequeathed his estate to establish a clinic for natural remedies to cure a host of potentially fatal diseases. The Peter Roux-Nel Trust was formed with three trustees of whom Louise is one of them. The trust has already begun with a mushroom project to be registered as Spores for Life.
Certain mushrooms are known to be medicinally beneficial. There is no academic research available in Western medicine, but the health benefits of mushrooms were noted ages ago in both Chinese and Japanese traditional medicine writings.
Both culinary and medicinal mushrooms will be produced. Currently oyster mushrooms are looking good in one of the greenhouses. There are king, grey and blue oyster mushrooms with pink oyster mushrooms being introduced soon. The process takes four weeks with two of those weeks waiting for colonisation. The interior has to be kept humid and wet with a moderate temperature. Gas heating is used in winter to keep the temperature up.
The mushrooms being cultivated for medicinal use are Shitake, Reishi, Maitake, Turkey Tail and Lion’s Mane.
Shitake, Maitake and Lion’s Mane also have culinary uses whereas Reishi and Turkey Tail, with their corky taste, are strictly for medicinal purposes. These mushrooms grow on oak chips and are dried for medicinal use. Louise says that mushroom tea with a dash of honey is ideal. The mushrooms have to be heated as this breaks down the cells to release the medicinal properties.
The medicinal mushrooms are ingested for cancer, diabetes and HIV/aids. Lion’s Mane contains a molecule that rebuilds the myelin sheath around the neurons and can regenerate brain tissue. These mushrooms boost the immunity and have NKC (Natural Killer Cells). In other words they target and kill, for example, cancer cells. Should cancer patients elect to undergo chemotherapy or radiation, mushrooms are a support structure for these treatments. Besides the mushroom nursery, the Trust is also growing essiac, a combination of four cancer busting herbs. They are rhubarb root, burdock root, sheep sorrel and slippery elm bark.
The operation is overseen and run by four young Limpopo hippies living in Native American teepees on the property. They live totally off the grid as well as plant and harvest their own food.
