A market garden producing heirloom and unusual vegetable varieties | Discovery | Gardening Australia

Hannah visits a market gardening couple who produce heirloom and unusual varieties of vegetables to feed forty families in their local community. Subscribe 🔔 http://ab.co/GA-subscribe
Early spring, particularly in cool climates, is often seen as a gap in vegie productivity – winter brassicas are finished, and summer fruits are a while off. However growers Grace and Dylan aim to produce delicious and nutritious food all year round, so their customers, their time and their income aren’t reliant on a few months of glut each year.

“We propagate all of our seedlings here on site and we propagate nearly every single week of the year, which is kind of unusual. We don’t stop seeding in winter.” All the plants are grown from seed which have been carefully selected for their suitability to the site and high success rate. They continually “edit what we’re planting, different varieties that we’re selecting, based on all the different trials we’ve done” to find the most productive outcomes.

They now operate a CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture, model of food production and distribution that directly connects farmers and eaters. They have a set number of subscribed customers that receive a weekly vegie box with whatever is in season. Dylan says, “We were really looking for something really different to grow for our CSA members and for it not just to be salad and spinach and carrots etc. every week. But really to kind of share with them some of things we were both really passionate about as well, being kind of unusual vegetables that maybe in another part of the world aren’t really unusual at all and are a huge part of daily eating.”

Grace says that growing heirloom and unusual cultivars “is a chance for more people to try and fall in love with different vegies and connect with all the history over hundreds of years around the world.”

Favourite vegies:
Chard ‘Erbette’ doesn’t transport well which is why it’s not commonly seen in supermarkets, but Grace says it’s really tasty, crisp and preferable to rainbow chard.
Gai Lan is “cultivated and grown for its stem rather than its leaf” though the leaves are a bonus!
Purple sprouting broccoli has become a staple as it’s so well suited to the climate, needing “a really cold winter to trigger it into producing shoots in spring… at a time when we might not have much else.” The taste is also different to regular broccoli, sweeter with a hint of asparagus!

Whilst they started with a traditional market garden approach, they now have a no till system using lots of organic matter to build up new beds. There are also 12 hoop houses – semi permanent, open-ended tunnels that create warmer microclimates to protect plants from frost and heavy rains. These have had a huge impact on being able to grow successfully year-round.

Grace & Dylan have achieved so much in a short amount of time and helped their local community celebrate and connect to the beauty of food.
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