THE BEGINNING

I grew up here in Pyree/Jerrinja Country and after 10 years living in the city have come back home to pursue growing flowers, a dream that started since I first studied floristry. I’ve documented the process so far on my instagram stories, saving them as a highlight but one year on am making a blog as everyone has said how much they’ve enjoyed watching the little videos. bare with me as I jump between tenses trying to document it somewhere! Initially I thought I’d grow really hardy flowers and set up a timed irrigation system so that I didn’t have to be there all the time, allowing me to still be in Sydney, but after a few months realised how addictive and satisfying it is watching your efforts turn into flowers. It wasn’t long till I shifted my mindset to then move home, because instilled in me is ~ if you’re going to do something, do it well ~ My first thought was can I even grow flowers? After the first spring and the beginning of summer I knew that I could, my next step was monetising it. I poured all my savings into setting it up and if I wanted to continue I needed to make some profit from it. My end goal is to use the flowers for weddings down here on the south coast, but after establishing myself in Sydney for 2 years, it felt like I needed to start again. I’d love to offer workshops were we pick the flowers and make a bouquet together or a vase arrangement and create something together, share a homemade meal, maybe I’ll start a veggie patch and get chickens too. The scope is huge!

My dad was a dairy farmer and so was his dad, and his dad, actually 5 generations of dairy farming, neither my brother nor I wanted to continue in dairy farming and went in other directions and so the dairy with its vat and adjacent sheds have sat for over a decade unused. We lease the land to the neighbouring farm and there is a small 1/4 acre patch in front of my grandpa’s house that isn’t really used as it was far too small for a neighbouring herd of 800. The only thing about this patch is that the end half becomes a little swampy, so in the near future I’ll be sourcing truck loads of top soil to raise this area, but the other half was gold. After a persuasive mum in the ear of my dad reinforcing that ‘it’s Anna’s dream’ my dad said I could use this 1/4 acre, so with a very limited amount of gardening knowledge sourced from more coffee table gardening books, I got to work.

I feel so lucky that so many things have worked in my favour to allow this and I’m incredibly grateful to my family, to grow on their land and be a big encouragement along the way.

Since starting my floristry business I’ve tried to take a sustainable approach, by using only what’s grown here in Australia, trying to use as much locally grown as possible as well as what is in season and be conscious of what I put back into the world. I wanted to grow flowers in the same vein of thinking, as best I can with a more environmentally conscious lens; avoiding pesticides, chemicals and use more regenerative farming techniques, which is possible for such a small scale.

My goal is to grow flowers that I can’t get at the flower market, they either aren’t grown, hard to get or are really expensive. I want to share these with other people and create with majority of the blooms I’ve grown because it is such a rewarding experience. There is so much to learn and I feel like I’ve only scraped the surface with growing, I’m thrilled to see what this 1/4 acre patch will look like in the years to come.

1 This is the first photo I found on my phone, having just ripped up the Kikuyu grass, a big job if you know how large the root system is, ready to plant my bearded iris rhizomes. The first big purchase that I made after the green light to go ahead.

2 I went with bearded iris as they were one of my favourite flowers, I had heard they were low maintenance, but are prone to rotting if left in water logged soils. The other important piece I read was that they multiply, and after a couple of years, if all goes well I’ll have triple the amount.

3 You can see how lush the area is but also how thick the Kikuyu grass was. This type of grass spreads rapidly, will grow over anything and dominant the area and it’s really difficult to get rid of!

4 This is the method I chose to rid the patch of the Kike. Using a black plastic tarp (which I can keep reusing). having it on until it has completely died, then lifting it back up and putting a bit of love back into the soil. You can see at the end of the photo a large hole which we think used to be a fish pond. The area was a bit uneven so I knew these needed to be filled. You can also see my very helpful dad lending me a hand.

5 We called in help. Gary removed a tree for us as well as digging the trench to lay the water pipe. Land-movers are great people to know.

6 As pretty as the tree was, it was half rotten and needed to go. This is when I also started to see if this eco weed matt was any good. I’ve been really hesitant to use a lot of the weed matts available because they seem so thick which in my mind would destroy the soil underneath, whereas this matt is breathable and lets some water through, maintaining good soil health. The only thing was that it’s expensive.

7 The trench.

8 I lifted up the tarp and Gary kindly scraped the dead grass away, revealing a nice slab of bare ground.

9 I love this photo, I think this is when my dad really started to get around the flower patch and realised how much I wanted to make it work and really invested a lot of time helping me, chatting through ideas I had and was genuinely very interested and encouraging. Here we’re measuring out if we had enough pipe already on the farm to use, which we did so that was a big plus.

10 We layed the pipe down, ready to be attached to the REMS water, which is recycled sewage water (it comes out clear) that is used in the Shoalhaven district. It fills the troughs for drinking water for the cattle and the best part is that this recycled water is free! And, probably still has a little nutrients in it for the patch.

11 Had a go on the tractor filling in the trench!