Who We Are & Why We Farm
We grow specialty vegetables, herbs, and dye plants for our community of Cape Town’s high end chefs, home cooks who value great produce grown well, and local artisans. Over the past seven seasons, we’ve developed great relationships by delivering quality vegetables weekly to restaurants such as Fyn, Salsify at the Roundhouse, and the Chefs Warehouse Group.
The farm is rooted in the belief that farming in a manner that benefits the earth and people can be profitable. While some of Iming’s background is in NGO work and we believe that NGOs play important roles, we don’t think that farmers and farming methods will shift unless they can make a living doing so. Though we are small by many standards (and we think quite beautifully situated) we operate as a farm and not a show garden.
Our love of farming stems from a fascination with the world of seed and crop varieties, intellectual curiosity about soil science, botany, and ecosystem management, and a desire to spend time outdoors in the dirt.
Our practices are a mix of methods learned during an apprenticeship at Stone Barns Centre for Food and Agriculture, volunteering on farms in the Hudson River Valley, and techniques gleaned from other small scale regenerative farms in the US and Canada. Part of the draw of farming are the seemingly endless mysteries to explore and lessons to learn. We base our practices on tested and science based methods including an understanding of soil biology, the impacts of tillage and soil physics, and the role of basic chemistry in the context of all of this. We also value and know that there is so much that we don’t yet understand about how plants and soils interact, where flavour comes from, and why some of the old methods of agrarian societies work so well.
Along with growing fantastic crops, we are excited to have a workplace where our family (furry and non furry, big and small) can run around, dig in the dirt, splash in puddles, sing in the rain, and discover the world of plants and animals. We want our girls to grow up knowing women can and do farm, drive tractors, build things, lift things, crunch numbers, love science, and take charge. We want life to be full of curiosity and wonder, joyful, and engaged.
We also love that the farm is a way to meet like minded people and grow our community and hope to meet you soon.
