Early Spring Planting in Cape Town: What to Sow for a Strong Season
Seasonality, and tapping into spring energy.
Early spring is the busiest, most complex time on our one-acre farm. Quails, chicks and ducklings are hatching, there are 23 goats to keep up with, and waves of seedlings to plant, care for, harvest and process. Our Jan-to-Dec calendar fits the growing year oddly, but a few deliberate choices set up the best possible spring and summer season. Here is what we plant and plan for in Cape Town.
Plant a second late-winter crop
Every year we plant a second winter crop of brassicas, carrots, broad beans, beetroot and leafy greens. Staggering the planting gives us calories from the root veg and cabbage and nutrients from the greens more or less year round, and it eases the pressure to fill every bed at once. We get one brassica season with heavy pest pressure and one with low pressure, which extends our napa cabbage harvest for kimchi and gives us a month or two where cauliflower becomes a staple. This works because our winters are relatively warm and sunny. In softer, shadier parts of the city such as Constantia, Noordhoek or Newlands, shorter daylight hours can make it harder.
Plan your onion crop, May to November
If you have the space, onions are a wonderful, low-needs crop that staggers the season further. In Cape Town, start them in trays around March, plant them out in May, and they bulb in November, because they depend on day length. We dry and braid ours and they keep for about seven months, with spring onions and leeks covering the rest of the year.
Give time to tomatoes and summer crops
Our tomato crop is a cornerstone of the year. We usually pause our workshops in October and our food co-op in November so we can focus on the tomatoes and fine-tune our watering to carry everything through the long, dry summer.
Keep planting, and keep observing
It is tempting to plant once and stop, but I am always surprised by the space I find when I walk the beds. A few habits make the difference:
Walk your beds daily with seeds or seedlings in hand, so you can fill gaps as they appear.
When you pull a finished crop, replant that space immediately.
Act on small problems fast, by removing a plant, adding compost, or dealing with pests, because small issues compound quickly.
Decide which plants you will keep for seed, and stick to it.
Ride the spring wave
The season carries an energy that is hard to name. When we feel tired, there is something restoring about watching growth accelerate and getting to be part of it. We are not the source of that energy, we are just finding ways to ride along as long as we can.
For more on sequencing a season, see how to plan your growing for next season and filling the hungry gap. And when the pests arrive, here is how we deal with them.
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