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Growing Mondays: Just keep growing
Midsummer in Cape Town can be hard.
Jo Hunter Adams
January 27, 2025
Hi! I'm Jo, writing from Heart & Soil homestead, a 1-acre homestead in the Far South of Cape Town, South Africa. Every week I share inspiration and education for your growing journey. Thanks so much for reading!
Welcome to Growing Mondays, where I share ideas to help you grow edible and medicinal plants.
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Our olive tree is delighting in the loss of it’s partner in a storm, by giving lots of olives this year.
The heat (or cold) passes
Midsummer can be challenging. Our wellpoint runs dry, and we stumble forwards. It’s either super windy, or super hot. (if you’re reading from the Northern hemisphere, the one big difference here is that we don’t have air conditioning or heating)
We live in a particularly harsh part of Cape Town, but I am guessing everyone’s spot is harsh in its own way.
This time of year, I keep my expectations really low. I just try to keep going out into the garden and discovering what is there to be harvested, and what small bit of maintenance I can do. We can harvest long, long after heat has set in.
One best practice for us is just to plan out meals slowly and gently, with our energy levels in mind. There’s usually a vegetable we’re keen and willing to centre a meal around, and so I just look, every day, for vegetables I have energy to prepare. And as this becomes habit, we make it through the heat unscathed, even grateful for the summer abundance.
The second thing to do is to plan our autumn planting. I plant out seedlings in March, when it is just barely cooler. Knowing our next steps is a huge encouragement. And each meal remains a gift.
Our carrots for Dumpling Monday this morning were a bit titchy, but they still do the trick.
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