Spring Planting has Begun

Hopefully slightly more relevant than my last post about The Crooked Car Dealer.

At long last. The first seeds of the season have been sown.

It's been a very sullen, cold and slow Spring so far. I know that some of my neighbours have taken their chances and sown their first Summer seed a couple of weeks ago already. I refrained, but we all agree on one thing: we greatly fear a repeat of last year's oddly fucked-up season. Last year Spring sprang pretty early, so we all leapt in and planted. Then it all collapsed. Through an unusually cold and damp October and November all the baby plants went dormant, and never really caught up with the growth we'd normally expect through Summer. Yields were way down, and some of the sunlight-hungry crops - Chiles particularly - barely produced any fruit at all until well into early Winter!

So this year, despite some promising weather a couple of weeks ago, I held back with my planting. But today was so Spring perfect a day - sunny, warm, and not a breath of wind - that you'ld have to be inhuman to resist.

So the first seeds are sown. First are the most essential Chiles, Tomatoes and Eggplants, plus a tray of Lettuce for seed. Let's see how the weird weather treats us. I certainly have enough to be getting on with to prepare the beds in the meantime, and I'll follow up with more seed-sowing in a week or so.

Crooked Car Dealer

This purpose of this post is simply to get the word into Googles Enormous Engine about a particular crooked car dealer so that any poor soul searching for a used car might be lucky enough to search first and so avoid dealing with this particular cretin. Probably not very interesting otherwise.

My son bought a used car from one Anton Pretorius of CAW Auto Parts at 28 Albert Street, George, Western Cape, South Africa. The dealer ripped him off terribly, selling him a vehicle with a completely defective engine, and numerous other mechanical problems. According to all 3 diesel-engine experts who have subsequently looked it over, the engine is worthless and has to be completely replaced. The problems were concealed by the dealer liberally dosing it with very heavy, syrupy oil which masked the oil leaks and piston/ring problems until the vehicle had been driven about 1000km.

Upon confronting Pretorius about the problems and demanding a refund, Pretorius refused to refund my son's money (against all provisions of the law) nor did he make any offer to repair the vehicle. We have subsequently laid criminal charges against Pretorius and CAW Motors at the George SAPS, but do not hold out much hope that the police will pursue the case with much gusto, such being the pisspoor state of law enforcement in South Africa. We also sent a legal letter of demand to Pretorius by registered mail. It was simply ignored. To follow up with a civil suit is likely to end up cost more than repairing or replacing the vehicle. Pretorius knows this and is relying on it, just as he relied on my son's naivety and inexperience of vehicle purchase to sell him this piece of shit in the first place.

A few days ago, in conversation with my insurance broker, we discovered that this Pretorius has also ripped off other clients of this broker in the past.

If you're thinking of buying a used car, please do yourself a favour and find a more honest dealer than Anton Pretorius of CAW Motors. The man is a thief and fraudster without conscience, morals or regard for the law.