The beginnings

As a crazy little family, we have always embarked on the mission of growing our own food. From filling our balcony with hanging pots full of veggies and flowers to running a 1 and 1/4 acre market garden selling produce into Toowoomba. There are so many moving parts to think of when you're gardening - weather, knowing the plants, knowing the soil, pests and diseases, understanding growing methods, nutrition etc... So it is one thing to learn and understand all those elements, but another thing entirely to plan out how on earth you're going to keep all of that up for the entire year. To be honest, it's really hard, but we've been there and done that (with a few mental scars to show! 😂) and take our hats off to everyone who gives it a go.

The journey to year-round production

Just before starting our market garden, we went away to the Bunya Mountains for 2 nights to get our heads around what we were getting ourselves into. We sat down and planned out the next 6 months of growing, starting with understanding what we were going to sell and then working backward to what we had to do to get there. We used pen, paper, and a 2022 all-year journal. It was messy, but it worked.

At this point, we had built up a knowledge of how likely we were to successfully produce x amount of each vegetable or flower and how long each veg/flower would be at what stage (days to germinate/days until ready to plant/days to maturity). With that knowledge, we could calculate when we would need to plant each seed or seedling and how much of each we would need to plant to achieve our gardening goals.

As the months went on, we got frustrated with the paper-based method and made a little website to help us plan out our growing strategy instead. Although it looked horrendous, it worked quite well and it sped up our farm planning process a whole heap. This software did the same thing - took what we wanted to produce, with what level of success we can grow the veg/flowers, and how long it took to grow them and then spat out a seeding/planting/harvesting regime. Very neat.

As we got better and more confident in our ability, we eventually ditched both the paper planner and the software planner, and got into a planting rhythm which suited our style - we knew how much we were going to need to harvest and sell each week so we would plant what we knew we needed. Doing this we were able to produce hundreds of bunches of radish, hundreds of lettuce, thousands of carrots and do so all year round. It was so fun.

We don't want this knowledge to go to waste

If we just stopped there, that would be the end of our growing journey. But thank God it's not, we really do love it too much. We've built up a heap of knowledge over our gardening years and we don't want to see it go to waste. We don't want you to have to trudge along through endless YouTube clips and spend countless hours trying different gardening methods to find one which actually works. We want to share the best ecological knowledge, gardening knowledge and regenerative knowledge with you so that you can find peace, connection and beauty in your garden.

We'd be stoked if our knowledge could help you. For free on our grow page, each plant has a simple breakdown of how long it takes to grow, and how long you need to wait between plantings in order to achieve continual harvests.

And if you ever need a hand knowing what to grow for our climate, head over to our store and check out what is in our seasonal garden boxes. The featured plants in those boxes will be a pretty good guide for when you're shopping. 😊

Blessings,

Dave