Australia: Small urban horticulture farm at Edenhope a huge success

Lucas and Alex King run a small-scale intensive market garden and catering business on 0.6 hectares at Edenhope, in Victoria’s West Wimmera.

By Sarah Hudson
The Weekly Times
June 4, 2019

Excerpt:

Lucas established the garden plot on 0.6 hectares in 2017, following the philosophy of Canadian urban farmer Curtis Stone and French market gardener Jean-Martin Fortier, who advocate easy-to-manage, standardised garden beds and fast-growing, lucrative crops.

As such, Lucas grows a variety of salad leaves, yielding up to 25kg a week almost year-round, which he considers his “fast-cash bread and butter”, in addition to other fast-growing crops, such as beetroots, carrots, baby radish and turnips.

He also grows longer summer crops including cucumbers, capsicum, eggplant and silverbeet, as well as winter crops of cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli and celery.

About a quarter of production is supplied to Edenhope’s supermarket, pub, coffee shop and a greengrocer across the border at Naracoorte, in South Australia.

About a quarter of harvest goes into weekly vegie boxes, picked up or delivered to local residents, and another quarter is sold at a Horsham fresh produce market.

But most ingenious of all, the remaining produce is used in his wife’s King’s Katering company, including Alex’s signature salads sold in 200g biodegradable containers at the supermarket, as well as value-added preserves, and to events across the region: weddings, morning and afternoon teas, lunches and even shearers’ meals.

“Having grown up here, it has always been difficult to get fresh produce in Edenhope, because we’re at the end of the line in Victoria,” Alex, 32, says.

“It always felt like any fresh vegetables had travelled a lot of kilometres before coming here and for that reason Edenhope has always been a meat-and-three-veg town.

“Now growing our own vegetables and making healthy meals out of them, our meals are in demand. The supermarket owner says the moment they hit the shelf, they’re out the door. It’s what people want.

“I even make shearers’ meals for Dad’s farm and they love the salads — still carbs, like potato salad or coleslaw — but with poppy seeds and purple cabbage, so it’s a bit different.”

ALEX was the first to launch her enterprise, in 2013, after meeting Lucas while both were working as firefighters for Victoria’s department of environment, land, water and planning.

With degrees in forensics and biomedical science — “two degrees I’ll never use” — Alex says she fell into catering after initially cooking for the shearers on the family farm and discovering her passion. Since then, she has simply taught herself.

Lucas, meanwhile, grew up on a small farm at Bega, NSW, and hankered for the good life when he moved to Edenhope and met Alex. They now have three children — Scarlett, 6, Lucius, 4 and Indianna, 2.

“I would have been happy being a monk in the mountains,” Lucas, 35, says.

“The way I had grown up on the land was appealing, the idea of self-sufficiency and living basically surrounded by the elements.”

So with zero horticultural knowledge, in 2017 Lucas threw in his full-time job and immersed himself in the teachings of Curtis Stone and Jean-Martin Fortier, implementing their guidelines across the property.

“They are the forerunners of a new movement going around the world for small-scale farming, using standardised production, growing fast-growing, profitable crops,” Lucas says.

Lucas has created four organic plots, each containing 16 beds that measure 1m x 24m, with the 1m width crucial to production.

“For instance, weed matting is made at 1m width, my equipment and tools are designed to work around these measurements, and the sprinkler irrigation too. Because you’re not dealing with different sized beds, it makes farming much easier.”

His biggest initial outlay was a $14,000 walking tractor, which acts like a rotary tiller to prepare beds.

Initially — and after each subsequent harvest — Lucas covers beds with silage tarps for several weeks to deprive the soil of light and moisture. “It’s called stale seed bed and it stops weeds germinating,” he says.

To avoid using synthetic herbicide, he also uses a flame weeder.

Because the Edenhope soil is sandy and largely infertile, Lucas is slowly building up organic matter by applying manure — usually cow or pig — as well as mulching in crops at the end of their life and adding in small amounts of lime. Lucas purchased a push seeder (as recommended by Curtis Stone), which considerably cuts down seed sowing time.

“Curtis loves the number’s game. He’s a pretty smart businessman and can earn $C100,000 a year on a quarter of an acre (1000sq m), with fast-growing salad leaves and microgreens. But where Curtis is tailored to feeding restaurants and high-end sellers, Jean is more focused on vegie boxes and farmers’ markets.

“So when I started growing salads and was inundated, saturating the market too quickly, I diversified in market garden-type crops. Even if they don’t get the best price, it offers the customer different options.”

“Inundated” is putting it mildly. When Lucas first grew his mix of salad varieties — including red and green mustards, tatsoi, baby red Russian, kale, spinach and rocket — in his first three weeks he had 21kg of greens.

“It was a big shock because I’d gone from nothing and within three weeks I had massive farm production,” he says. “I was a farmer but at that time had no one to sell it to.”

Leafy greens beginning to grow.
Leafy greens beginning to grow.
He also learnt the hard way the importance of having a salad harvester, as well as a wash and pack area and coolroom.

Now Lucas harvests the salad leaf with a oscillating blade, driven by a drill, which can pick a bed in 15 minutes, “rather than using a knife for hours”.

He has a giant tub to wash salad leaf in his shed, alongside a giant spinner in a converted washing machine, then bags and labels the mixed salad leaf, before refrigerating it in his 2m x 2m cool room.

Aside from logistics, so far Lucas has encountered no significant hurdles: “things want to grow”.

Leeks haven’t been a great success, so they’re off the list, while he’s decided to shut the garden beds through the hottest days of summer.

Cabbage moth is the only pest to have posed a risk, for which Lucas will net the garden beds.

He has a rotation for heavy feeding crops, such as tomatoes, always growing something different every other year, but adds the salad greens do not require a rotation.

The Kings also have 10 chooks that not only supply eggs, but eat bugs and insects and Lucas is also in the process of establishing a permaculture food forest of trees to house beneficial insects.

For two years Lucas has had a part-time off-farm job, but will this year go full time on the property.

“I love working on the property, being home, ducking in for lunch and being with the family,” he says.

“It’s rewarding going out and picking fresh produce to eat.”

Adds Alex: “Every day I’m grateful for our life and this lifestyle.”

King’s Katering and Farm Produce

Lucas and Alex King run a small-scale intensive market garden and catering business on 0.6 hectares at Edenhope, in Victoria’s West Wimmera. They grow salad leaves and vegetables, selling fresh produce and value-added salads, preserves and pickles, run a vegie box delivery service and cater for events.

Where: Edenhope, West Wimmera

More info: facebook.com/KingsKatering

Read the complete article here.