IN FULL BLOOM
EDIBLE FLOWER GROWER SIMONE JELLEY APPROACHES FARMING AS AN EXPRESSION OF CREATIVITY, WONDER AND JOY.
Simone Jelley’s sought-after, award-winning edible flowers have made her a homegrown success story.
says Pretty Produce owner Simone Jelley. “I think it’s because I am a creative, visual person, and flowers are an absolute showcase of the beauty and perfection of nature for me.”
No wonder, then, that Simone, 52, has built a life around blooms. Growing masses of zinnias, cosmos and sunflowers on an idyllic property on the edge of Lamington National Park in south-east Queensland, Simone is in her element. But she hasn’t always been a farmer – less than a decade ago, she was a photographer for a newspaper. After a redundancy set her adrift, Simone’s husband Dave, 53, suggested she redirect her creativity into a vegie patch at their home on Macleay Island in Moreton Bay.
“I started off with corn and tomatoes, but it quickly spiralled completely out of control into edible flowers and unusual edibles. And then I was down the rabbit hole of what is edible, full stop,” Simone recalls.
As a foodie, Simone had an inkling that edible flowers were an untapped market. She started selling salad leaf and flower mixes to locals on the island, and word spread to restaurants on the Gold Coast and in Brisbane. “I was using up everybody’s land around me and I was called the ‘cloud farmer’,” she says. “Then Dave said, ‘For goodness’ sake, Simone, let’s just get you a farming lease!’”
Setting up on nearby Lamb Island, Simone’s range expanded to weeds by accident. Her first “epiphany” was seeing gotu kola, an Ayurvedic herb from the pennywort family, in a new light. “It was the first weed I was fighting in my garden and it was only when I jumped online to look at buying unusual edibles that I saw it going for $5 a pop on a particular website. That was amazing to me, that a weed had value, because we’re not taught that,” she explains.
Simone identified other edible weeds on the island and began pairing them with tasting notes for chefs at a time when the trend for wild and foraged foods was taking off. She also began exploring chemical-free growing and has become an advocate for practices such as stewardship of the soil, attracting predatory insects, and interplanting species to avoid monoculture. >
“We get the most astonishingly beautiful light here. It’s that misty, romantic light.”
“[Chemical-free growing] makes sense when you’re doing edible flowers, because you’re not doing a washing process – they’re just picked, put into punnets and sold,” she says.
After winning delicious. Produce Awards in 2016 and 2017, the roller-coaster ride of farming took Pretty Produce from dizzying highs to an abrupt low – by the end of 2017, drought had made it impossible to continue farming on Lamb Island. Scaling the business back down to their home plot, Simone and Dave decided to return to their roots and buy a farm on the mainland. Both had grown up in the country: Simone on cattle and sheep stations near Bathurst and then Kalgoorlie; and Dave on a farm in Victoria.
“It took a year to find this jewel,” says Simone of their 3.2-hectare Canungra property, Silverwood Farm. “But the minute I drove down Lamington National Park Road, I felt like I’d come home.” However, relocating was anything but smooth – the drought was ongoing, bushfires raged, and COVID-19 hit soon after they moved in. “We raced to get the property into food production,” Simone recalls. “We had everything pumping for the first week of January, then by March, the whole thing just shut down.”
Simone nimbly pivoted into growing vegies for local food boxes and turned her creative mind to diversification. Then an emotional encounter with a domestic violence victim during the pandemic inspired Simone to share the joy of her overflowing flower beds as a wildflower forest where people could “just ‘be’ in a field full of nature, colour and beauty.”
So, last summer she opened the farm gate to visitors. But, Simone admits that the concept didn’t land the way she envisaged. “Most people are conditioned to screen time,” she says. “It was really interesting. They didn’t know how to respond other than just taking selfies.”
Undeterred, she now plans to host healing services such as counselling sessions among the flowers. In the meantime, she’s focusing on her range of pressed flower ‘portfolios’ – collections of dried, pressed flowers and foliage for cake decorating and cocktail garnishes – and creating an edible meadow of 55 different plants, including Asian greens, legumes and herbs.
“I’ve got a paddock that’s sitting there blank, and I want to get the mix right and set up this beautiful meadow that you can just walk through and pick what you like. To be surrounded by nature doing it, so it’s not like a clinical process or a transaction between you and the space,” she enthuses. “It’s like finding treasure.”
As Simone says, the future looks pretty.
For more information, visit prettyproduce.com.au or follow Simone on Instagram @pretty.produce