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What To Plant In Spring
Here is the Good Food Network guide on what to plant in spring!
Tickle your garden with seed – we recommend the incredible seed packs now for sale via Food And Trees For Africa – and tantalize your palette with healthy organic fresh foods.
Seeds from Food and Trees for Africa
Some of the seeds in this post are available from Food and Trees for Africa (FTFA). They have a great variety of seed boxes that can cover one hectare of ground easily. These boxes are great for schools, community gardeners and small scale farmers.
The different packs comprise of Starter, Summer, Year-round and School.
Each pack contains 6x 50g tins of seed for only R380 which can plant over one hectare of ground or 2 years with of food for a smaller home garden.
Seed packs can be collected from FTFA’s Johannesburg offices, but we hope they will soon be able to delivery all over the country! If you live outside JHB, please let them know how badly you want a pack and lets see how quickly we can make a plan to get national delivery going!
Starter packs: Runner beans, Swiss Chard, Cabbage, Onion, Carrot & Butternut squash
Summer packs: Tomato, Sweet Peppers, Pumpkin, Baby Marrow (Zucchini), Eggplant & Cayenne Pepper
Year-round packs: Swiss Chard, Lettuce, Kale, Mustard Spinach, Spring onion & Cabbage
School packs: Swiss Chard, Tomato, Sweet Peppers, Lettuce, Basil & Peas
What To Plant In Spring?
Lettuce
The trick with getting Lettuce to germinate quickly is to expose the seed to sunlight for a few hours before sprinkling a very light layer of potting mix over them. Plant them in the shade in summer as the lettuce bolts quickly in extreme heat. Water lettuce in the evening with a fine sprinkle.
Tomatoes
Tomatoes are a wild thing. The more space you give a tomato to grow, the bigger the plant gets and the more tomato you will have to harvest. When you water tomatoes, rather use drip irrigation. The tomato plants like basil, marigold and borage as companions.
Swiss Chard
Swiss Chard is usually called “spinach.” Swiss chard is hardy and usually easy to grow. Make sure you snap the whole stem off at the base, as cutting and leaving stems cause the plant to become moridbund. Grow Swiss Chard all year round with beans or onions.
Onion
Onions are like babies, taking nine months to grow from seed. Onions germinate readily in seed beds and are transplanted after four to six weeks. The onion repels insect pests. About a month before maturity, bend the onion stems to encourage better bulb development. Plant onion with apple, beetroot, carrot, and kale.
Basil
Basil and Tomato are great growing companions. Shiny black Basil seeds pop to life happily in the Spring. Basil comes in a variety of flavours, so be sure to pick and choose your favourite ones. Ocimum Basilicum (Basil’s botanical name) is a popular culinary and healing herb. Basil loves to grow in full sun.
What To Plant In Spring Written by Jeannine Davidoff
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