In the lead up to Father’s Day, Sunday 17 June, Smile Breakfast is looking for Cape Town’s best moustache.
If your dad, gran-dad, brother, son, or anyone you know has a majestic mouth-brow, Bobby and Lindy want to know.
Tune in to Smile Breakfast at 07h30 every morning to join in the fun; and check here daily to cast your vote and help us pick the winner.
Just by voting you could win R1000 cash! 

One of the things I love the most about presenting a breakfast show is the opportunity to interact with our Smileys on their way to work or as they tackle the school run in the mornings. Sometimes I’m even given leave from the studio to do so!

With Winter just around the corner and the cold weather setting in, Bobby and I reckoned that if we were craving soup, the rest of the Mother City must be too. Thus, on the 31st of May, the idea of the first ever Smile Breakfast Pop-Up Soup Kitchen was born during Smile Breakfast. We decided to make a few big pots of soup and hand it out to people the next morning as they started their day.

Spar Cape Quarter heard about our plan and kindly offered to supply 50 litres of soup and a space to distribute it outside their store in Green Point. We were thrilled! The next morning, dressed in our beanies, coats and jackets, Bobby and I made our way out of the studio and to our pop-up soup station in Somerset Road. Between 07:00 – 08:00 we handed out over 400 cups of fresh, steaming hot vegetable and butternut soup.

It was so rewarding to see the look on everyone’s faces when they walked past, shivering from the cold, hurriedly getting to where they needed to be only to be offered something warm with a smile – a small gesture that would hopefully make their morning a little more special.

One rather burly gentleman approached me and told me that he listens to Smile 90.4FM every day and that we’ve become like family to him. He told me he’d been through a tough time recently. We chatted a little more about our stories, about sadness, about his worries for his children. And then someone behind me was asking for a cup of soup, and I had to go. He gave me a quick hug and left. As he was walking away, he looked back. He waived slightly, and smiled. I smiled back. Then he was gone.

I’m continually awed by these small moments, made of nothing but a few minutes of life shared in the entrance of a grocery store. I’m awed by the power of a smile. I’m awed by the way my heart is changed by the people who are willing and vulnerable enough to share their stories with me. I’m awed by this sometimes sad, beautiful life. What a gift it is.

As a proud Rotarian, I was delighted when our Global President adopted a very exciting project for the year of his leadership and his request was simple – asking every Rotarian world-wide to plant one tree which would mean an additional 1 million trees.

South Africa loved the idea but as Capetonians we were faced with an additional challenge in that we’re being asked to plant trees in one of the worst droughts we have ever experienced.

But South Africans are used to “maak ‘n plan” and we looked for creative solutions like growing water-wise trees like the Spekboom or planting them in schools and parks where we knew they would be looked after in those first few years.

So successful was the Cape Town initiative that rather than just one tree per Rotarian we ended up with nearly three trees each, a clear testimony to how we had adopted this initiative.

But still it’s only a drop in the ocean or in this case the forest.

Every year, we as a planet cut down about 15 billion trees and getting them replaced is a very slow and expensive process, but there is a potential answer in something called seed balls or if you want to be a green militant, a seed bomb, and it’s such a simple process.

A seed is placed inside a ball of charcoal dust or clay, which protects the seed against animals and birds and extreme temperatures, until the rain arrives, and the seed begins to germinate.

It is as simple as throwing and growing. Seed balls are currently being used in Kenya and several countries around the world where in Kenya alone, nearly 6 million trees are cut down every year. This unique method not only makes the planting process faster but also radically cuts down the cost and can be as cheap as about 2 US cents per ball.

Firewood is crucial in Kenya where 90% of rural homes use wood as their main fuel. Seed balls are very popular and so far, almost 2 million have been sold and they are just as easy to make as demonstrated by loads of YouTube videos.

It sounded like such a great initiative that I did a little research on, and discovered that it is an ancient growing technique and not just for trees.

In ancient Egypt the technique was used to repair farms after the annual flooding of the Nile and they would use small clay balls filled with rice seeds and throw them on the banks of the river. After the river flooded the clay was heavy enough to hold the seed and protect it long enough for it to germinate at little effort and small cost.

The technique was resurrected in Japan after World War II when they needed to speed up food production without taking away from traditional agricultural lands.

Google it and see some of the crazy and innovative ways people are distributing the seeds. From shooting them into fields using catapults to seeding the earth from planes.

I love it, creative solutions to save or replace our forests can only be a good thing.