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01
The place ·
The Soil Under Rooibos Cannot Tell It Is Farmed
Someone sequenced the soil bacteria under wild rooibos and under a farmed field nearby. No significant difference turned up, which unpicks a tidy sustainability claim.
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02
The place ·
Rooibos Bushes Keep Turning Up Insects Without Names
Between 2020 and 2022, three leafhoppers new to science were collected on cultivated rooibos and described for the first time: Geelus dundraad, Colistra acapitatus and Colistra bucapitatus. None of the three does the plant any harm.
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03
The trade ·
How Rooibos Became a Crop, With Help From an Ant Heap
Before rooibos could be farmed, its seed had to be found and coaxed to sprout. The answer ran through a Clanwilliam doctor, a hard seed coat, and a colony of seed-hoarding ants.
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04
The place ·
How Rooibos Is Grown, From Dormant Seed to Rested Field
Here is how the red bush actually gets planted, grown, and rested, from a seed that refuses to wake up to a field given years off to recover.
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05
The place ·
How Wild Rooibos Is Harvested, and Why It Rests Every Other Year
Wild rooibos is not planted, ploughed, or sown in rows. It is cut by hand from the veld on a rule harvesters worked out mostly by watching what killed a bush and what let it come back, later confirmed by a decade of field research.
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06
The plant
The plant ·
Rooibos Gave Its Name to the Fungus Trying to Kill It
A fungus has been killing rooibos bushes in the Cederberg for decades, and when scientists finally sorted out what it was, they found it was already infamous, on another continent, under a soybean farmer's name for it.
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07
The place ·
Rooibos Has Three Real Insect Pests, and Almost Nothing Registered to Spray on Them
An ARC survey once counted 110 insect species living on cultivated rooibos. Only three do real damage, a leafhopper, a looper, and a root-boring moth, and South Africa has registered almost no chemical product for any of them by name.
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