In 1977 Heather and I purchased a 37 ½ acre bush bock (we wanted 5 acres, but the larger block was cheaper so we bought it!) – the block was so overgrown, Heather and I took nearly 1 hour to get to where our house is now built.

We built and moved into our new house in 1978, and decided to clear the land so we could run a few cows. Unfortunately, when we looked at this idea we needed over 1km of fencing. So Plan “B” was to plant peaches and cherries (with no fences). At this time we had a fish & chip shop, so we figured growing potatoes would break up the soil and make it better for growing trees. This proved correct and we planted 3 – 4 acres, and to this day we still have potatoes growing from this initial planting.

After 7 years we found cherries not to be a good option for this area – birds and rain virtually took all of the crop year after year (bird netting wasn’t an option at this time), so we pulled all the cherries out and planted more peaches.

Time moved on and prices seemed to drop more each year. By the time we had been farming for 20 years, we were starting to wonder if there was any future for a small peach farm. During this time, we had only made decent wages one year – all the rest we just survived. In fact, up until our 23rd year, we couldn’t even afford to do repairs on our house. When we started growing fruit we were getting around $25 – $28 per 9kg tray. The year we stopped sending fruit to the wholesale market we were averaging $8 for 5kgs.

Our customers at farmers markets started to ask if they could come and visit the farm, so we said “yes”. This proved to be very difficult as when you are busy and under pressure, having visitors wandering around and getting in the way was at best a nuisance. As we were and still are a working farm, this was not sustainable, so we approached Yarra Ranges Regional Marketing. They arranged a questionnaire from Tourism Vic to give us an indication if our business was suitable to be a tourism operation. We filled this out and it gave us the answer – our business and position were nearly perfect for tourism. We then started to research what other farms were doing on the tourism front, what bus companies expected, and what we could do to be different and make the farm more interesting. All made the comment – do it properly or don’t do it at all.

The aim was to get away from “supermarket fruit” that looks good but has no flavour, and focus on growing varieties of fruit for their taste, not their size and unblemished appearance. We wanted people to come to the farm and experience traditional fruit flavours straight from the tree, to taste a fresh sweetness that would bring many people back to childhood memories of fruit from yesteryear, when fruit was grown more for flavour than a uniform shape.

The future now looks pretty good – with a small amount of success enthusiasm has really kicked in, the ideas just keep coming…our latest is to offer visitors the opportunity to preserve their own fruit.

There seems to be a very strong move for city people to come out to regional country areas to see where their food comes from, to learn about aspects of sustainability and to experience farm life.

The State Government, through Tourism Vic sent us to Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore in June 2013 and 2014 to meet 120 travel agents in these countries. This has had a big impact on our business, as currently around half of our customers are coming from Malaysia and Singapore. The expectation is that this will increase substantially over the next few years, as these contracts start including our farm in their Australian tours.