Flick and I moved to the North East in 2014 after quitting our office jobs in Melbourne and travelling around Australia for 6 months in an old Troopy.

 

We'd already basically decided to move to the area before our trip but told ourselves that we were open to finding somewhere better to move as we traveled round. Turned out we didn't see anywhere that would suit us better.

 

I told myself that I wouldn't be getting another office job when we got back from the trip and planned to do a Permaculture course or something similar to see where it would take me. Problem was we had dreams of buying some land and building a house and that didn't seem possible without some steady work so we both continued on with our careers - Health Promotion for Flick and Engineering for me.

 

A few years on we have some land in the beautiful Murmungee Basin and are well on the way to building a house. With this goal achieved and my growing lack of passion for sitting behind a desk I started looking seriously at what I really wanted to do. It's a great question to ask yourself "If money wasn't an issue, what is it that I would really want to do?".

 

The answer for me took a while to surface, but slowly but surely it become obvious - Start a Market Garden. I love being outside doing physical work, digging in the dirt and building things, growing plants and trees and as much as I don’t want to admit, I love a simple, sleek and efficient system. 

 

All that was left to do now was deal with the fear that had been stopping me from doing what I wanted to begin with. What will people say, How can I just leave a career after 5 years of study and 10 years of experience, will it fail and we won't be able to pay the mortgage, will our relationship suffer because of all the stress, and probably lots of other fears that I don't really understand.

 

Anyway, got through that (sort-of) and loving the decision. At this point I have to thank Flick for being OK with the change and keeping the cash coming in while the business gets off the ground.

 

Another thing that helps to boost our confidence is our passion for eating organic, fresh and locally grown food. There's already some great producers in the area, but as Matt from G&G Produce put it "there's plenty of room at the trough".

 

There's not exactly an overwhelming abundance of fresh local organic veggies in the North East and I can't see why there shouldn’t be. It's definitely heading that way anyway and we're stoked to be contributing.

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