Seventh tool in the Farming section, and this one started from something that’s bugged me for a while: almost every planting calendar you find online is either written for the Northern Hemisphere, or it’s a single national list that quietly assumes South Africa has one climate.
It doesn’t. Gauteng and the rest of the summer-rainfall interior get frosty winters and plant in spring. The Western Cape is the reverse, wet mild winters, dry summers. The Northern Cape is dry and hot most of the year. The KwaZulu-Natal coast and the Mpumalanga/Limpopo lowveld barely see frost at all. Pick your province, and where it actually matters, which part of it, plus a month, and the tool shows vegetables, herbs and fruit for your real regional pattern, with an action (sow, start in trays, or transplant seedlings), an expected harvest month, and sun, water and difficulty ratings.
That second question matters more than it sounds. A few provinces genuinely span more than one climate, KwaZulu-Natal’s Durban coast is subtropical but its Midlands and Drakensberg towns get real frost, and Mpumalanga and Limpopo are mostly cool highveld except for their lowveld pockets, Hazyview, Nelspruit, Hoedspruit. Tap whichever description actually matches where you are and you get that pattern, not the province average. (This used to be a free-text town field. I dropped it, partly because it broke on iPhones, Safari’s autocomplete suggestion could cover the input while you typed, and partly because it was never really about the town, there’s no per-town data behind it, just these same regional patterns, so a direct tap-to-choose question is more honest about what the tool actually knows.)
Honest caveat on sourcing, since I’d rather say it upfront than have someone catch it: the vegetable months come from two real South African planting charts, not something generated. One province’s chart, though, had every warm-season crop landing in the middle of winter, which isn’t right anywhere in the country, so I dropped it rather than publish it, and instead let you pick directly between the other regions’ patterns for that province, whichever actually matches where you are. Herb windows aren’t from a chart at all, since nothing at that level of regional detail exists for herbs, they’re modelled from each herb’s known cool or warm season habit, and the tool says so rather than pretending it’s sourced the same way as the vegetables.
If you garden and this gets your month or region wrong, I’d genuinely like to know, that’s exactly the kind of thing worth fixing.