Beautiful blooms are fresh from her farm to your plate
A NEW market for edible flowers grown in the northern Tablelands is slowly gaining traction.
Kate Mitchell has run Julatten Earth Foods since 2007 selling her fresh fruit and vegetables as well as her beautiful blooms direct to restaurants for more than a decade.
But, at 60, the pressure to find a less physically demanding way to earn money off her Churchill Creek Rd property helped her win a contract recently to provide hotel food supplier Simon and George and Cairns retailers Jonsson’s Farm Markets and Cherries Health + Wellness Store with the tiny, colourful, floral morsels.
Despite only hitting the shelves in the Cairns stores in the middle of last month, they are selling well.
“I also sell wholesale, but once I started putting posts up on Facebook people started asking where they could get them from to use for themselves,” Ms Mitchell said.
“I do have a market stall at the Mossman markets where I sell my own vegetables and fruit, I have a coffee cart and make cakes decorated with the flowers. And I do sell punnets of the flowers there.
“I’ve been doing this for a long time, but I only just started this side of my business.
“They’re just starting to move into southern Queensland, they’re new to Rocklea markets, and after that I will move into Sydney and Melbourne. The flowers I grow are very different from flowers grown down there and I can produce things here in winter time that they can’t.”
Ms Mitchell, whose early memories are of eating nasturtiums and watching bees in the garden, has always worked on the land and she said she is “quietly confident” the new venture will “become a nice little business”.
“I just love what I do. I’m a hippie from way back and everything is grown with love and sunshine and lots of manure,” she said.