For Jane Vassallo of Sydney's Gourmet Herbs, it's all about the personal touch. In a world where everyone seems to want to grow to the hugest possible extent, she's all about small and perfect.
A hydroponic grower of micro herbs and edible flowers, her Hawkesbury operation has captured the imagination of those in search of high-quality produce in Sydney. But she got there in a series of steps.
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Vassallo says, "How it all started was we used to live in the lowlands, and we couldn't cope with the floods anymore, so we bought something up high where it doesn't flood, and we started to grow vegetables on the ground like we used to do in the lowlands. But between the neighbours, the rabbits, the ducks, and all the departments under the sun, it was just ridiculous."
It wasn't a simple switch to herbs from there, though, although she did move into hydroponic growing. She says, "We started doing hydroponics, and we just started using a small area of land, growing fancy lettuce — and then that was doing one step forward two steps back because there was so much in the industry back then in hydroponic growers."
Her first tentative steps into herbs didn't work quite to plan. She says, "I said to my husband, I want to do something different from what we're doing, so I started growing basil, but the cost of heating to do that was ridiculous. "And I also started doing Russian tarragon as well, but I got allergic to it and couldn't do it anymore."
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So the idea came to her to grow micro herbs in punnets and see how that went. The answer was very good. "I went literally from one glasshouse to, I've got one, two, three, four singles, and I've got five doubles, and basically that's it, it was all about doing something different because I'd had enough of what I was doing."
Her business makes a decent return, but that's not the point for Vassallo. She says, "I love growing. No one taught me how to do this; my dad gave me the tools to work with the hydroponics, but because he was doing fancy lettuce as well, it was up to me to work out how to grow this. And trust me, hydroponics is not as easy as everyone seems to think. So yeah, it's just water going down, you're under shelter, it's much easier than being in the outdoors, but honestly, if it's raining, it's actually harder to grow indoors than it is if you're out in the rain."
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For someone who likes to be in charge, Mother Nature proves a tough adversary. "There are always challenges ahead of you, because no one can control Mother Nature, and Mother Nature always likes to throw in a few things in for me every week to fix. And I'm a perfectionist, so it drives me crazy when something doesn't go right — I need everything to be perfect."
For Vassallo, that desire to produce the highest quality has meant she's not interested in scaling up. "No, I'm not going to get bigger, because I've already got other people growing for me. I've just built another glasshouse now, even though I said I would never do it, but I have, and I did that for winter purposes."
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Instead of being outside as she loves, she finds herself in the office quite a bit. It's a step back into a past where the craft is important. She avoids automation on the whole, not from any fear of machines but because she feels she can do it better by hand.
She says, "I am a bit old school, but I love the way I do it. There's that saying, " Don't fix something that's not broken. And every time I try to change how I do something, it always backfires in my face."
For more information:
Jane Vassallo
Gourmet Herbs
Tel: +61 416 000 614
[email protected]
www.gourmetherbs.com.au
