Ground

We are Ground, a working pecan farm in Muldersdrift run by the Cronjé family, and we've been hosting weddings here since 2016 — more than 280 of them, and counting. This isn't a venue built to look like a farm; it's an actual working farm, with real pecan orchards, farm vehicles crossing the property, and animals that roam free between the rows, that happens to also do weddings extraordinarily well.

Our two anchor spaces are the ones we're proudest of. The Tobacco Shed — once exactly what its name suggests, now our largest indoor venue — seats up to 250 guests for formal dining or holds 400 for a standing reception, an industrial-meets-elegant shell of steel trusses and glass that we dress however a couple wants, from bare and moody to draped and candlelit, with the AV and lighting to match. Step outside and you're under The Pecans, our outdoor canopy of mature pecan trees strung with festoon lights, which takes the same numbers — 250 seated, 400 standing — for couples who want their whole day under open sky.

For something quieter, we send couples into The Wattle Forest, which can hold upwards of 300 depending on layout but feels intimate even at scale, the dappled light through the canopy doing most of the decorating for you; or down into The Vineyards, where we set a single long table for up to 60 guests between the vines for a slow, harvest-style lunch or a golden-hour dinner nobody forgets. The Lawn handles arrivals and cocktail hour for up to 120 guests, and for something smaller still, our Veggie Garden seats 30 around a three-course harvest table built from produce grown a few metres from where it's served.

Because we cater everything ourselves — food and beverage run through Ground, never an outside caterer — the day moves as one operation rather than a string of separate vendors arriving and leaving. Nicci Campbell, our in-house wedding coordinator, is with couples from the first site visit through to the last song, and our decor and florals come through JC, our in-house stylist. A DJ and sound engineer are ours too, running the sound and lighting from ceremony through cocktail hour and into the reception, so nothing gets handed off halfway through the night.

We're upfront with couples about the one thing none of us in South Africa can fully control: load shedding. We keep a generator on standby for every single wedding, and if Eskom does what Eskom sometimes does, we switch it on — no scramble, no dead dance floor, just a modest standby and hourly charge for the peace of mind that your reception won't go dark mid-speech.

Because a wedding at Ground is rarely a single-day affair, we've built out real overnight stays on the farm rather than sending guests to a hotel down the road. The Beach House and Rose House are our two larger self-catering homes, each with a king room and two more queens; Rose House adds a champagne bar and a boma with a fire pit for the night before, while Beach House suits a quieter morning-of getting-ready. Sue Cottage and The James units offer smaller, simpler rooms for wedding parties who just need a bed after a long night among the vines.

We keep our wedding rates seasonal and weekend-driven, with peak-season Saturdays needing a minimum guest count, and we ask for a 50% deposit once a couple has walked the farm and decided it's theirs. Most people who come to see us choose Ground for the same reason: it doesn't feel styled to look rustic. It is rustic, genuinely, because it's a working farm first — and a wedding venue because it turns out we're very good at both.