What are the opening hours?

Saturday 09:00 - 16:00 Sunday 09:00 - 16:00

http://www.heartandsoilhomestead.co.za/

Heart & Soil Homestead, 46 Lochiel Road, Sunnydale (2025)

25/04/2025

1) Dumpling Mondays- our napa cabbages are big enough. Now we have to ride the wave of winter produce. I'm amazed that winter produce always has everything we need to be well-nourished in the cooler weather.
2) Hot cross buns for all. (well, our neighbours and ourselves)
3) The Almond agaricus keep on coming....

24/04/2025

This weekend I'll cut some fresh produce from our garden:
fresh lettuce (cos and iceburg) 20
Napa Cabbage R40
baby beetroots 30/bunch
Spring onion 25
Bay leaves 20
Gotu Kola 20
Moringa 20
Curry leaves 20
Basil 30/50g
Lemongrass 30
Sceletium 30/30g

A friend asked for help selling some worm towers! We can offer them with worms included or without) If you've been wanting to compost with worms for a while, this is a great and affordable opportunity. R750 for a tower, with worms included in one section so you can get started right away.

And this weekend's seedlings will be the last for a while!: (we'll be closed the first two weekends of May)

26th and 27th April seedlings:
Fennel
English spinach
Spring onion (carel and red spring onion)
Swisschard (rainbow and Foordhoek)
Napa Cabbage
Star round Cabbage
Broccoli
Beetroot (3 types)
Garlic Chives
Parsley (Flat leaf and curly leafed)
Red Tuska Frilly lettuce
Cos lettuce

24/04/2025

Another teenager in the house! The gift of this place is the gift of being able to spend lots of time with our kids as they grow up. And to never rush. Eli has so many things that he loves, and his love and enthusiasm is contagious in the best way.

1) Eli with his cake
2) It's a guinea pig cake with lots of guinea pig babies....
3) Noah made Eli a model of subnautica whale...

23/04/2025

"Start where I am capable of making a difference, even just a small gesture everyday."

This week I am so excited to be sharing Ellen's story in our Thursday newsletter. Ellen is living and farming in the Crags. Here's a sneak peek:

"I am the most proud of my ability to see, study, experience and love the diversity in the world. From the soil to the stars, this world is an endless phenomenal experience, each element and organism an individual and at the very same time connected to all others around - how delightfully simple and infinitely complex is that? I myself have played many roles - daughter and sister, wildlife biologist and farmer, wife and mother."

We'd love you to follow along as we share stories from all over South Africa, every week. Send me a message if you'd like to tell your story, or if you'd like to follow along. We'd love to have you.

18/04/2025

Hana picks olives for us. We're brining in several 5L buckets, and hoping. But picking olives is never a wasted effort, no matter the outcome.

16/04/2025

A bed of saffron starting to emerge. Frivolous with few expectations, but oh so fun.

15/04/2025

"Whoever controls the seeds dictates what you eat."

In this week's newsletter, I am so excited to be sharing from Siphiwe Sithole of . Here's a sneak peek:
"I am a farmer that focuses on indigenous African crops, produces seeds, and aggregates produce from a network of farmers across the country."

As I prepare grower and food systems stories each week, I'm inspired to work towards common values, and to value people, stories, and our growing environment above profit or convenience.

If you have a story you'd like to share, or a favourite local farmer, I love to interview them. Hearing and sharing stories are a way of making us all a bit braver, perhaps in small ways throughout our week.

Send me a message if you'd like to be added to our newsletter! You can just write your email address and "newsletter" and I'll get you added.

14/04/2025

"Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?"

In today's newsletter, I talked about a growth mindset, drawing on Carol Dweck's book "Mindset".

Our past failures and successes are a way to learn, not to label ourselves as good or bad at something.

I really appreciate that our homestead is not a competition. We can ever really "win" or succeed. It's just a place of continuous cycles of life and death, where mainly the knowledge of whether things are going well or poorly are felt deeply within us, and are not based on external measures or visible to outsiders. We could have a great crop yield but it is not a good thing because we don't harvest and eat it timeously. We could have a terrible yield and it is a sign of growth because we prioritised ecology or time with our kids. At the same time, our yield can keep improving according to the key values we hold dear.

Here's to a growth mindset in our growing.

1) Baby chameleons are coming into their colours (they start out grey-brown)
2) Hana catches tiny fish with her hands each morning. We have small fish in most of our water catchment to control mosquito larvae
3) The very beginning of what looks to be a large olive harvest. Half excited, half terrified we'll ruin them in processing.
4) Autumn seedlings. We sell half, plant half, and by the end of April thousands of veg will be making their way through the growing cycle. Autumn and winter growing is wonderful after the first rain!!!

11/04/2025

Getting edible mushrooms in our garden has taken ages. We live a too far from mushroom foraging forests to make regular trips, so I've had this longstanding dream to have useful mushrooms right at home.

Layering horse manure based compost for many years led to Agaricus subrufescens (Almond agaricus), which has spread into many of our beds and gives us more mushrooms than we can keep up with, at least this time of year. They really enjoy cultivated beds.

09/04/2025

"When working on a problem, I never think about beauty; I think only of how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." - Buckminster Fuller

In this week's newsletter I'm so excited to be sharing Matt Purkis’ story. Matt’s work straddles SAOSO (South African Organic Sector Organisation) foundation and Project Biome, looking at big picture transformation in agriculture.

Here's a sneak peek: "When I discovered Permaculture, it was like finding the missing instruction manual for humanity. It showed me how design could be used not just for pretty things—but for powerful, practical, ecological change. It made everything click."

08/04/2025

It's autumn planting time, and in this past weekend's workshop I showed how we deal with pests (or don't), how we navigate imperfection, and how we think about a yield.

The food system is complicated, messy, and full of problems. We are what we eat, but we are also what we think, how we relate, how we reflect and act on the inequality around us, and how we build our community.

To be in it for the long haul, I think we have to accept the complexity and jump in.

Big thanks to Carolyn for photos!

05/04/2025

1) Lots of seedlings. It's seedling time for us. Winter is extra fun because so.much.lettuce. They are R3/seedling, and our goal is to make it easy for anyone to start growing. We'll have for this month, and then it'll just be onions in May and not much in cold June...

2) Eli (12yo) sold his most recent painting to Heide, and it's heading to Hamburg. The two before that are in the Paediatric unit in Wynberg military hospital.

3) It's tiny house nation over here as we gratefully finish a tiny dwelling on our property. We hope it will expand options for our community (sorry for any noise while it's finishing up) Hana makes a mini version in cardboard.

02/04/2025

In this week's newsletter I'm sharing Bertie and Alette’s story. I’m so excited! I’ve been baking with Lowerland flour for years, and know the miracle it is to see actual scale production of regeneratively farmed food. I hope you enjoy their story as much as I did.

"We were always passionate about farming for the final food product—we wanted to farm wine not just grapes, bread not just wheat, steaks and briskets not just cattle. This perspective shaped our vision for Lowerland: to produce a diverse basket of healthy, nutritious food at great value for consumers while regenerating our soils and our social and natural environment."

We'd love you to join our newsletter as we immerse ourselves in stories of growth and learn to grow better together!

01/04/2025

1) Ripples from a banana leaf... 2) This banana bunch is bigger than anything we've had before, and it means that our environment is slowly changing. More sheltered, less stressed, softer.

27/03/2025

Autumn is a great time to plant. I'm looking forward to workshop time with some of you in the coming weeks.

This Saturday:
29 March 9-10:30 Food Forest Workshop

Coming up:
5 April 8:30-10 Veg growing workshop
19 April 9-10:30 Medicinal Plant workshop with special guest René Nägeli

If you'd really like to attend anything but don't have capacity for the bundles that come with the workshop right now, let me know and we can make a plan.

You can book via our link in bio, and I'll also post the link in the comments.

AND! Becky, vegan baker extraordinaire, will be here on Saturday with her plant-based treats. Help spread the word and build up local entrepreneurs.

26/03/2025

In this week's newsletter, I am excited to be sharing from Mpho of Sustainable Abundance Permaculture. Mpho is working on ways to allow small-scale farmers to use their collective production to access markets.

Here's a sneak peak:
"Use small slow solutions" the 9th principle of permaculture. We often burn out or get lost trying to do everything at the same time, or at least I do. The small solutions are often the most stable and resilient, and they build on each other over time into something big and successful."

Here's to all the people working to make South Africa better, more sustainable, and healthy. If you'd like to follow along with our newsletter, I share growing tips every Monday, and Farmer/grower stories every Thursday. We'd love to have you!

S.A. Permaculture

25/03/2025

My goodness rain never felt so sweet as the first rains after the gruelling end of summer heat.

1. End of summer peppers. Maybe Cherry Belle peppers? Sweet and good, kindof like pepperdews. One kid doesn't like it when I put peppers in soup. They says they're like little slugs. Thanks dear one.
2. Napa cabbage 3 weeks in. I'm going all in on a few hundred Napa cabbages this year because our (well, Eugene's) kimchi is so good and sells so well.
3. Dipper gourds. Last year I didn't do anything with them. This year we messily made bird houses, the kids (even the neighbour's kids) and I. Something about a hand saw and scraping the guts of the gourds is highly therapeutic. But no energy to actually clean up the guts. Next I'll be basket weaving, anything is possible at this point.
4. Okinawan sweet potato. So many kinds of sweet potato, so many theoretical dreams of sweet potato as our main staple. Nothing ever turns out as you expected but things (the homestead, myself, my taste buds, the world) do change, and I just watch for little turning points, little tiny bits of leverage.
5. Figuring out when to plant out the unirrigated cement blocks is superstitious and impossible. Too late and I miss good growing time (there are about 650 veg in them). Too early and well, they die. This year I started with the first day of rain, and did about 150 each day.
6. Moringa as an actual proper happy tree. It's possible in Cape Town everyone. Our moringa trees generally look like they wish they were somewhere else (like, say, India) but we finally have one growing that looks like it wants to take over. Now, just wait, the legendary health benefits and glowing skin and hair will enter us all, except moringa shots didn't go well. We'll try again. I'll be sneakier this time. No one will even know.

22/03/2025

First dragonfruit of the season.... This colour!

Then I realised, I have become numb to the glorious colour of beetroot, I don't notice them anymore. So maybe dragonfruit will remind me to notice beautiful purples other places.

Heart & Soil Homestead

25/04/2025

24/04/2025

24/04/2025

23/04/2025

18/04/2025

16/04/2025

15/04/2025

14/04/2025

11/04/2025

09/04/2025

08/04/2025

05/04/2025

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