Farms have always been fascinating to me - maybe it's because my maternal grandparents were farmers and even though they didn't live on a farm as I grew up, they grew the most wonderful tasting vegetables and fruit. Or maybe it's because I was lucky enough to grow up in a small town where we had enough space for chickens and ducks and veges and flowers and all kinds of wonderful plants. (My mum is a plant magician!) So here's a little bit about the Fiokhea Flowers farm for those of you who are also fascinated with farms!
Where is the farm and what's it like there?
We farm on Gundungurra country, in Lower Boro in NSW. We’re an hour’s drive from Canberra, located near Tarago (which you pass on the way to Nowra or Jervis Bay if you're travelling from Canberra). We’re almost equidistant from Bungendore, Braidwood and Goulburn, but our farm microclimate is quite different from those areas in some ways. We are on top of a small hill, and our farm faces east towards the coast, so we find the weather is a few degrees warmer overnight during autumn, winter and spring than it is in the lower areas around us. This really helps with the flowers! Our frosts here aren't typically as severe as in surrounding local areas, and that allows us to grow things outdoors even once many other Canberra Region flower farms have ended their season. We also usually get a lovely sea breeze each afternoon in summer which sometimes brings the smell of the ocean.
What kind of farming do you do?
It’s really important to us that our farm is a haven for biodiversity, and we try to ensure we’re safeguarding our environment for future generations. We grow all our flowers without pesticides or chemicals. We’re very conscious of the environmental and human harm that comes from imported flowers drenched in herbicides and flown thousands of kilometres, so we try to provide a healthy, insect-friendly and low-carbon alternative for Canberra flower lovers. (We also try our best to ensure our packaging and wraps are made from sustainable and biodegradable materials, and we try to avoid excess wrapping on our bouquets.) We only sell our flowers locally, so there are no extra travel kilometres. When you buy our flowers you can be assured that they have travelled only the short distance required to get them from our farm to you!
Plant Selection for Sustainability and Regeneration
The land at our farm is (unfortunately) not cropping land. It's low-nutrient, rocky, acidic soil with very little topsoil and organic matter, There's also very little flat ground to farm on - most of the land is sloping off a hill in one direction or another. Approximately half of the farm is natural bushland, some of it is semi-cleared from previous farming (which we have been letting revegetate in many places), and a small portion is cleared land. In the cleared section we have our house/sheds and annual beds, protea plantings, duck coop, and a paddock for grazing (for the kangaroos at the moment as we no longer have any sheep).
Because we don’t have traditional cropping land, it’s important that we farm what will work in our soil and conditions. But the downsides to our soil fertility and land are also some wonderful upsides for our native plants.
The soil drains very well, so plants like banksia, protea, grevillea, hakea and persoonia (Geebung) love it. We’re lucky enough to have threatened species like Geebung, Banksia Spinulosa and Grass Trees growing native on the farm. That's why we've invested heavily in proteas and native plants for the future of our farm. They work for our soil and climate conditions, but they also help regenerate the land and provide habitat and food for our native animals. The milder frosts we get also result in less frost damage to our proteas and other plants flowering in the winter months.
View and Wildlife
Up top are a few photos of our farm. We have a beautiful view out over the valley to the east. We have a lot of casuarinas growing on the farm, so it’s also a haven for cockatoos, including glossy-black cockatoos, yellowtail cockatoos, gang-gangs, and the pesky white cockatoos and cockatiels.
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