FAQs
🌱 Soshanguve Lab: Gardening FAQs Real answers from the Evergreen Hideout Backyard Lab
🌿 Your Gardening Questions — Answered From the Ground Up
Welcome to the Evergreen Hideout FAQ — a living collection of answers to the most common gardening questions we hear from fellow South Africans. These aren't textbook answers pulled from the internet. Every question here has been answered based on real experience in our Soshanguve garden, where we've tested methods, made mistakes, and learned what actually works in Gauteng's challenging climate.
What you'll find here:
- 💧 Watering & Irrigation: When to water, how much, and why morning is the only time that makes sense in Gauteng.
- 🌱 Soil & Composting: How to build healthy soil, compost in small spaces, and fix heavy clay without expensive equipment.
- 🐛 Pests & Diseases: Natural, chemical-free ways to deal with cutworms, aphids, snails, and powdery mildew — without harming your soil biology.
- 🥬 Crop-Specific Guides: Detailed advice on growing tomatoes, garlic, Swiss chard, cauliflower, beetroot, and more in South African conditions.
- 🏙️ Container & Urban Gardening: How to grow food in small spaces — balconies, alleyways, and recycled containers.
- 🧑🌾 General Gardening Tips: The most common mistakes new gardeners make, the importance of mulch, saving seeds, and knowing when to harvest.
- 🤝 Community & NPO: How Evergreen Hideout works and how you can get involved.
- 📚 The Real Grow Series: A 24+ post documentary of building a food-producing garden from scratch in Soshanguve.
Why we created this FAQ: When I started gardening in Soshanguve in 2021, I had no formal training. Everything I learned came from trial and error, research, and asking older neighbours who still remembered how to grow food. I made plenty of mistakes — crops eaten by pests, seedlings that failed, harvests that never came. But every failure taught me something valuable.
This FAQ is my way of sharing those lessons with you. Whether you're a beginner gardener with a small backyard, a teacher starting a school garden, or an experienced grower looking for new ideas, you'll find practical, honest advice here — written by someone who's been in your shoes.
How to use this FAQ: Click on any question below to reveal the answer. If you can't find what you're looking for, reach out to me directly — I answer every message.
— Kutlwano Mokoena, Founder of Evergreen Hideout