When to sow foxgloves in Pretoria

Why these dates

Sow on the surface in early summer, about six weeks after the last frost; the seed is dust-fine and needs light. Move the rosettes to their final position in autumn, twenty weeks after the last frost, and they will flower the following June. Leave one spire to seed and you will never sow it again.

Hardy to about -20C as an overwintering rosette, which is the form it spends the winter in. It needs that cold winter to trigger flowering, so it performs poorly in zone 10 and is treated as an annual bedding plant there.

Seed packets and extension guides express timing as weeks either side of the last spring frost, because that is the only reference point that travels. Foxgloves are timed with planting out 20 weeks after it, and this page simply resolves those offsets against the frost date computed for Pretoria.

Pretoria sits in zone 10a, which is milder than this crop wants, and a winter that never really arrives is its own problem. The dates below still describe the right time of year; the open question is survival rather than timing.

This is a two-season crop, so the dates above describe a sowing in one year and a flowering in the next. The plant spends the winter in the ground as a small rosette, which is why the frost-free season in Pretoria does not limit it the way it would limit a tomato: it is not trying to finish before the cold arrives, it is trying to be well enough rooted to sit through it. Sowing too late is the real risk, because a plant that goes into winter undersized often fails to flower at all the following year.

See every crop timed for Pretoria →