Should I be making flashcards for cognates? Or even at all, if using the natural method / comprehensible input?

I've recently taking up learning Spanish, and my method so far — and hopefully well into the future — has been to almost exclusively use comprehensible input. This has been working great via videos à la Dreaming Spanish and the fantastic Spanish-only All Spanish Method textbook (similar to Lingua latina per se illustrata if that rings any bells).

My only worry right now is that I'll start forgetting some words, especially some of the lower-frequency textbook ones. Or perhaps if I don't forget them, I'll have trouble using them actively. So, I figured I'd start using some SRS flashcards, as these have been of immense benefit on my ongoing Chinese-learning journey.

However, the fundamentally different nature of Spanish and the natural method raises a few questions. Namely:

• Spanish has lots of cognates with English. Límon, en, color, melón, adjectivo, partes, ... the list goes on. Is there any need to make flashcards for such words?
• For other, less obvious words, might making the flashcards ES ~> EN (as opposed to ES ~> definition in ES)* run counter to the natural method and reduce its effectiveness? That is to say, should natural method flashcards be monolingual?

In an ideal world, there'd be no flashcards at all, as extensive reading and listening would serve as authentic immersive practice. However, juggling three more languages + a soon to be a heavy university workload has led me to believe this is the best option for long-term maintenance of Spanish. However, I'd like to hit the ground running in terms of efficiency.

Am at a bit of an inner impasse and would greatly appreciate any insights from my fellow linguaphiles~

\To preemptively clarify, flashcards would have native audio and contextual Spanish sentences in either case.*

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