Plant your own: heritage fruit orchard & veggie garden

The opportunity to plant a new garden fuels the daydreams of all aspiring gardeners. We invite the dreamers to join us during Garden Week for a masterclass on how to plant and successfully grow your very own heritage fruit orchard and vegetable garden.

For this workshop, we travel to Soetmelksvlei, a delightful new experience by Babylonstoren. Following a short ride along the picturesque slopes of Simonsberg, we’ll descend towards the historical Soetmelksvlei farmyard. Here, visitors are offered a glimpse of life before the turn of the 20th century through the immaculately recreated interiors of the Farmhouse and Old Cellar, as well as the garden.

The fruit orchards and veggie gardens are an integral part of the Cape Dutch werf – of equal significance to the animals in the kraal, the watermill, carpentry in the workshop and the mampoer distillery.

To portray farm life in the late 19th century, we selected old heritage fruit varieties that were grown at the Cape around 1897. Some cultivars are still grown and well known to gardeners, such as Fan Retief guavas, Cape rough lemons, Elberta peaches and Adam figs. Other cultivars had been tried at the Cape but never flourished, such as the December pear and Cox’s Orange Pippen apples. Mulberries, loquats and jambos, again, grew so readily that gardeners planted them but never bothered with named varieties for centuries!

Join us as we explore these and other intricacies, with practical tips on how to grow your own food at home, in honour of Garden Week.