Vegetable, Herb & Fruit Planting Calendar (South Africa)

Because South Africa spans several genuinely different rainfall and frost patterns, not one climate. Most of the interior, Gauteng, the Free State, North West and the Mpumalanga and Limpopo highveld, gets its rain in summer and frost in winter. The Western Cape is the opposite, wet mild winters and dry hot summers. The Northern Cape is dry and hot for most of the year. The KwaZulu-Natal coast and the Mpumalanga and Limpopo lowveld stay warm and frost-free all year. A calendar built for one of those patterns, or copied from a Northern Hemisphere source, will get whole seasons backwards for the others.

It depends entirely on where you garden, which is the whole point of this tool, pick your province (and, where a province genuinely spans more than one climate, which part of it) and the month, and the vegetables, herbs and fruit cards above update to your actual region's pattern. As a general steer, though: the summer-rainfall interior (Gauteng, Free State, North West, the Mpumalanga and Limpopo highveld) plants most of its warm-season crops, tomatoes, beans, sweetcorn, cucumbers, in spring, September to November, and its cool-season crops, cabbage, carrots, onions, in autumn, February to April, with a quiet frosty gap in the middle of winter. The Western Cape, with its wet winters, runs closer to the opposite pattern for several crops. There isn't one answer for the whole country, which is exactly why a generic national planting calendar gets South Africa wrong.

Select Gauteng, Western Cape or KwaZulu-Natal above and the current month, and the vegetables, herbs and fruit cards update immediately, no extra questions needed for any of those three, since Gauteng and the Western Cape each follow a single pattern, and the Durban coast is KwaZulu-Natal's default. Gauteng follows the summer-rainfall Highveld pattern, frosty winters and a spring planting rush. Cape Town and the rest of the Western Cape follow the reverse, winter-rainfall pattern. Durban and the rest of the KwaZulu-Natal coast are frost-free and subtropical, though if you're inland in KwaZulu-Natal's colder Midlands rather than on the coast, pick the "Midlands / Drakensberg" option that appears once you select the province, since that part of the province follows the Highveld pattern instead.

Vegetable planting months for the summer-rainfall Highveld region come from Organic Seeds' South African Summer Rainfall Region planting calendar, a multi-source compilation that distinguishes sowing seed directly, starting seed in trays, and transplanting seedlings. The Western Cape, Northern Cape and subtropical regions use Seeds for Africa's own province-by-province South African planting charts. Garlic is not covered by either source in enough detail, so it uses the standard South African autumn planting window (February to April) in every region. Herb windows are not lifted from a source chart, since no South African source publishes one at this level of regional detail, they are modelled from each herb's known cool-season, warm-season, or hardy-perennial habit applied to the same regional temperature pattern already sourced for the vegetables, and disclosed as a model rather than a scraped fact. Fruit tree bare-root planting windows and typical bearing seasons are standard South African nursery convention for deciduous and subtropical fruit.

Because a handful of provinces genuinely span more than one climate pattern, and there's no single town name that would work for everyone reading this. KwaZulu-Natal's Durban coast is frost-free and subtropical, but its Midlands and Drakensberg foothills, around Hilton, Howick and Nottingham Road, get real winter frost and behave like the Highveld. Mpumalanga and Limpopo are mostly cool highveld, but their lowveld pockets, around Hazyview, Nelspruit/Mbombela, Hoedspruit and Tzaneen, are warm, frost-free bushveld. The Eastern Cape spans all four patterns in this tool depending on where you are in the province. For those four provinces, a short second question lets you pick whichever description and example towns best match where you actually are, rather than guessing at a single province-wide answer. We tried this as a free-text town search first, but that only helped if you already knew which of our handful of listed towns was climatically closest to you, and it broke badly on iPhones, where Safari's autocomplete suggestion can visually cover the input as you type. Picking a plain-language description is more reliable and, if anything, more honest about what the tool actually knows, since there was never real town-by-town data behind it, just these same four regional patterns.

Pick whichever description and example towns feel closest to where you actually are, full sun and frost pattern matter more than being right next to one of the named example towns. If you skip the question entirely, the tool uses the pattern that's typical for most of that province, the same information a generic provincial planting chart would give you, which is accurate for most people in most of these provinces and only a rough fit if you're in one of the less typical corners of the Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga, Limpopo or KwaZulu-Natal.

The Eastern Cape is the one province where we could not find a single reliable source chart. A commonly cited per-province planting chart for the Eastern Cape had every warm-season crop, tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, sweetcorn, shifted roughly five to six months into winter, which is not physically plausible anywhere in South Africa and was unusable. Since the Eastern Cape genuinely spans a winter-rainfall western strip near the Cape border, a warm humid central and eastern coast, a dry semi-arid Karoo-edge interior, and frosty interior highlands, we instead offer a direct choice between the other three regions' sourced charts, whichever actually matches your climate, with the subtropical coastal chart as the default for most of the province.

These are the three actions the Highveld region's source data distinguishes. "Sow/plant" means put seed directly in the ground now. "Start in trays" means start seed indoors or in seedling trays now, to plant out once it's grown on. "Transplant seedlings" means put out nursery-bought or already-started seedlings now, generally because it's too late in the season left for seed sown directly outdoors to reach maturity before the weather turns. The Western Cape, Northern Cape and subtropical regions' source data doesn't distinguish these three actions as finely, so every month shown for those regions is a simple sow or plant action.

Yes, switch to "When do I plant a specific crop?" above the month field. Pick your crop from the dropdown and the tool shows a 12-month strip for your region, coloured boxes mark the months it can go in (green for sow/plant, blue for transplant, brown for start in trays), with the exact sowing and expected harvest range spelled out underneath. It reads the same regional data as the main month-by-month view, just organised the other way round, by crop instead of by month, so the two modes never disagree with each other. A handful of crops genuinely have no good planting window in a particular region, Melon in the Northern Cape's dry interior is one, and the tool says so directly rather than showing a blank result.

For vegetables and herbs, it's your selected planting month plus that crop's typical sow-to-harvest time, rounded to the nearest month, a standard seed-packet-style estimate. Actual timing shifts with variety, weather and how warm or cool the season runs. For fruit trees and vines it works completely differently, since a newly planted tree does not fruit in its planting season, so the fruit section instead shows the typical bearing season once the tree or vine is mature, together with roughly how many years that usually takes.

Winter genuinely is a quiet month for direct in-ground planting in the colder, frost-prone regions, and the source data reflects that honestly rather than padding it out. Two things are still usually worth doing in a thin month: check the fruit section, since bare-root deciduous fruit trees are planted specifically in winter while dormant, and check whether anything is flagged "start in trays" for the Highveld region, since trays let you get ahead of the season under cover even when direct sowing outdoors would fail.

No, these three ratings are general per-crop growing requirements, full sun versus part shade, how thirsty a crop typically is, and how fussy it generally is to grow well, and don't change by region in this tool. What changes by region is when you can plant each crop, not how much sun or water it wants once it's growing.

Apples, pears, peaches, plums, apricots, figs and grape vines are deciduous and need a real winter chill to break dormancy and fruit properly, which the Highveld, Western Cape and Northern Cape regions all get. The subtropical region, the KwaZulu-Natal coast and the Mpumalanga and Limpopo lowveld, is frost-free and doesn't get that chill, so these trees generally perform poorly or fail to fruit there. Instead, the subtropical region's fruit list is frost-tender fruit that actually suits that climate: banana, pawpaw, granadilla, guava, mango and litchi. Strawberries, which aren't frost-chill dependent, appear in every region.

No, it's a general regional guide, not a site-specific guarantee. Your own microclimate, altitude, soil, an unusually early or late frost, and how sheltered your garden is can all shift these windows by a few weeks in either direction, and growing under cover or in a greenhouse extends most of them further. Treat the result as a well-sourced starting point for your region, not the last word for your specific garden.