Seasonal calendar

Pakistan’s two crop seasons: Rabi and Kharif

Everything in the calendar above sits inside one of two seasons, and knowing which explains most of what looks arbitrary about Pakistani produce prices. Rabi is the winter crop: sown October to December as the heat breaks, harvested March to May. Wheat is the Rabi crop that matters nationally, and with it come gram, mustard, and the winter vegetables — carrots, cauliflower, peas, spinach, the main onion and tomato plantings.

Kharif is the monsoon crop: sown April to July as the rains arrive, harvested October to December. Rice, cotton, sugarcane and maize are the national Kharif crops, and the summer vegetables run alongside them. Some growers squeeze a short third planting — often called Zaid — into the gap between the two, usually melons, fodder or a quick vegetable.

Sindh sits at the dry end of this system. Our monsoon is later and far less reliable than Punjab’s, so canal water from the Lower Indus network does most of the work the rain is supposed to do, and a weak monsoon shifts the whole Kharif calendar.

Summer vegetables in Pakistan

Summer here is brutal — May to August runs around 40°C on our fields — and the vegetables that handle it are the ones bred for exactly that. Okra (bhindi) is the backbone: it crops through the worst of the heat and keeps producing as long as it is picked. Alongside it come the gourds — bottle gourd, bitter gourd (karela), ridge gourd, tinda — plus cucumber, aubergine, chillies and heat-tolerant tomato varieties.

These are sown from around February through June and picked into the monsoon. They are at their cheapest and best in June and July, and anything from this list bought in January has been trucked from somewhere cooler or grown under cover.

Winter vegetables in Pakistan

Winter is when Sindh grows properly. Mild days, cool nights and no monsoon pressure produce carrots, cauliflower, cabbage, peas, radish, turnip, coriander, spinach and the other leafy greens, and it is the main window for tomatoes and onions too. Sown September to November, harvested December through March.

This is also when vegetables are cheapest, which is not a coincidence: everything comes in at once, none of it can be stored for long, and the price falls accordingly. Carrots are the clearest case — a winter carrot from local ground and a June carrot are two different purchases at two very different prices, which is why our vegetable price page carries the season alongside the rate.

Seasonal fruit, month by month

Mango opens in late May with Sindhri — ours comes in from the last week of May — and runs through to Chaunsa in September. Dates follow in July and August. Guava starts in August and holds through the winter. Kinnow and the citrus run December to February, and strawberries take a short, sharp window at the end of winter.

Fruit sold outside its window has either been in cold storage or has travelled a long way, and both show up on the plate. We list fruit and vegetables only in their own season, and say nothing for the rest of the year.

The monsoon, and what it decides

The monsoon reaches Pakistan from around July to September. In Sindh it arrives later and lighter than in Punjab, and in some years it barely arrives at all — which is why this is an irrigated farming region rather than a rain-fed one. What the monsoon reliably does here is set the Kharif sowing window and, when it comes hard, waterlog ground that has just been planted.

We have written about what preparing for it actually involves, and about what comes off the fields each month.