The best crops of the lot

The couple’s biggest money-spinner is microgreens. That's thanks to their fast growth, which means the couple has fresh crops to sell every 10 days.

“The microgreens came about after a conversation with my sister who had a restaurant in Western Australia,” says Anne. “She was talking about pea tendrils, and how they look really pretty on salads, and we wondered if you could get them here… and the (microgreens) grew from that conversation.” Their next best crop is the salad greens.

“People love it that we're spray-free, and local, and we only harvest the day before (sale),” says Steve. “They get 12 days life out of a salad bag, as opposed to supermarket varieties.”

Anne says many of their experimental crops have surprised them by quickly becoming best sellers.

“The ginger and turmeric was quite funny. We grew it for ourselves and couldn't eat all of it, so thought we'd sell it, and it snowballed."

In 2019, the couple built a 55m² tunnel house and filled it with turmeric and ginger. To encourage customers, Anne shares her cooking experiments.

“You can use all parts of the turmeric plant. I only just found out about (the leaves), so I did a test-run; I got hamburger patties and wrapped them in the leaves. You get turmeric flavour, you get yellow juice, but it's a slightly sweeter taste than the root. Apparently, you can also pound the leaf and make a paste to use in curries, but I haven't tried that yet.”

Steve likes odd crops. When he got hold of a subtropical plant catalogue, he couldn't help himself, despite their block's non-subtropical climate.

“We've got paw paw, sugar cane, bananas. The bananas are still growing even after being frosted a few times, we're very impressed.

"The sugar cane is quite hardy, it looks like a bull rush and just keeps growing – I'll probably make some alcohol with it.”