Taste: A little plot to call our own

MUCH of the fun in gardening for Hilary and George Hartley is satisfying the strange cravings of picky chefs, writes ELAINE REEVES.

Hilary and George Hartley of Saltwater Farm have a vegetable farmers market stall at the Italian Pantry. (L-R) Joe Hartley with his mother; Hilary Hartley of Saltwater Farm.

THE “lawn” in front of George and Hilary Hartley’s house is potatoes. In the past it has been pumpkins. Hilary aims for a few roses and peonies but there is no point in being completely frivolous with the space behind a wallaby-proof fence.

Hilary and George are ace gardeners. It is just the ornamentals that have not got much of a look in the since they moved to 9ha at Saltwater on the Tasman Peninsula in 2008 and began their Grown for Taste market garden.

They came from Western Australia, where they sold everything they grew at Albany Farmers Market. By the time the Farm Gate Market started in Hobart in October 2009, George and Hilary were ready with a range of salad leaves and herbs, all grown hydroponically.

Hydroponics was a quick way to get started — and to grow the vegetables. Pea tendrils took a couple of weeks, beans four to six weeks and tomatoes about four weeks.

Now they grow more than 30 different vegetables, with several varieties of some. And they get down and dirty, planting vegetables such as kale, brussels sprouts and cauliflower in the ground.

For a couple of years they grew turnips, but Hilary says if they want to keep working into their 80s (they are in their early 60s now) something had to go before their knees and backs did. So turnips, which require too much scrabbling in the mud, are off the menu.

Hilary’s favourite way to take stress off her back is a “timber frame that moves along the row on bicycle wheels and has a shearer’s back aid hanging from it. It allows one to pick broccoli and not feel the bending. It’s very effective, but it looks like a mobile gallows.”

Too much life was happening for them to keep up the weekly market stall — Hilary had a “cancer adventure”, George’s parents lived with them for a while, and there were crises in the lives of their children.

Now their son Joe and his wife Hawa sell their vegetables behind the Italian Pantry in Hobart on a Saturday morning from September to June, and Hilary and George’s main customers became the chefs at many of Hobart’s better restaurants.

Chef at The Source, Philippe Leban, asked them to grow a super-sweet onion called domenica. They did, and now he buys 10kg a week from them.

George says: “Some people remember them from 30 or 40 years ago, when they were called something else. Mention onions that you can eat like an apple and some of the old fellows really spark up.” And he says they give a “whole new meaning to caramelised onions”.

It took only half a day to find an Australian source of the domenica seed but five years searching to source seed for a shooting cabbage, or espigall, called Chou Branchu du Poitou, in France. They sell flowering shoots from several brassicas in spring, but espigalls are designed” for this use.

George and Hilary each has a computer and desk in their front room and “sometimes we just sit there following a lead”, Hilary says.

“It’s a form of sport with us to find this stuff.”

Bespoke provisioning to chefs is heavy on administration, however.

Hilary says every Friday morning they walk around the farm together and survey what they have, make a list and email it to chefs and shops.

As orders come in they are entered on a spreadsheet.

On Tuesday, they start digging and picking to order, leaving the most perishable until last, before delivery on Thursday.

“Then there is the invoices and then there is the waiting for the money,” Hilary says.

The income lag and the ideal of “putting good food on family tables at a price they can afford” led them begin a market stall again.

Most of their range was esoteric cheffy stuff.

“There is a limit to how much Barbarossa mustard and purslane householders are going to need,” Hilary says.

“So we went home and grew carrots and cauliflower.”

Now, every Friday between 3.30pm and 7pm they open a shop at Taranna, opposite Fish Lips Cafe, and “bloom where we are planted”.

Soon they will also be selling at a new food co-op at Dunalley Neighbourhood House.