Our Story

Our Story
Heirloom Harvest grew out of our passion for and enjoyment we gain from growing our own food. This passion took us from growing in our small back yard veggie patch to being professional market gardeners.


We believe there is no more rewarding feeling than sitting down to a meal you have grown yourself. There is something primal about growing food that is missing in the modern lifestyle. Preparing and enriching your soil, planting your chosen variety of seeds, nurturing the new green life sprouting from the earth, protecting your plants from hungry insects, harvesting your crop, turning a recipe into a true homemade meal, sitting down at your dinner table and enjoying your home-grown vegetables. Unfortunately, with our modern consumer economy approach to everything, this experience has been lost to most people. Our mission is to bring it back!


Growing your own vegetables is not only fun and rewarding; the food you grow yourself will be more flavoursome and often more nutritious; it also saves you money and is one of the best things you can do for the environment. Gardening and vegetable growing brings one back to nature and provides a reality check on how dependant society is on the earth and why we need to look after it.


All the seeds we sell at Heirloom Harvest have been grown by us on our market garden. The varieties are the same as we grow and sell at our market stall. All the tool we sell are the same as we use on our market garden. As we make our living from growing and selling vegetables (and seeds) you can be sure the varieties and tools we offer are reliable and of the highest quality. We are not just seed savers we are seed breeders. We consistently select our seed lines for the best traits to continually improve their genetics.


Heirloom Harvest is proudly an Australian, family owned and run business.
 
About John and Tara
Tara loves gardening. She is at her happiest, covered head to toe in dirt, in amongst the veggies. Tara grew up in the Barossa Valley, immersed in the food and wine culture. Growing up she enjoyed visiting her grandparent’s farms in the Adelaide Hills and getting ‘stuck in’ to whatever farm work was being done. Tara studied Tourism and Hospitality Marketing at the University of South Australia, focusing on eco and environmental tourism, and has a successful career within the industry. After having their first child (Maya), Tara became concerned about the ‘artificial’ world that Maya would grow up in. For her, Heirloom Harvest is about reconnecting people with the earth and their food and in the process hopefully helping to create a better world for her children to grow up in.
     
John grew up on his family’s cereal and livestock farm before studying Agriculture at the University of Adelaide and going on to work in agricultural research. Growing food is in his blood. After realising there was something wrong with the modern food 'industry', John decided to try something different. He did some further study in social science and ethics before settling into a career in ecology. It was through his ecology career that he came back to growing food with new-found energy and enthusiasm. Rather than complaining about what is wrong with the current food system he decided to be part of the solution. Home food production (followed a close second by small scale organic agriculture) is the most sustainable and resilient food system and one of the best way people can contribute to the sustainability of society.   
 
Tara ~ “Getting my hand dirty growing food is one of my favourite things to do. Planting a seed, nurturing the seedling, weeding, and watching a plant grow to its full potential is such a simple but rewarding pleasure.Heirloom Harvest for me started as something I could do to make a small difference to our children’s future. I never imagined how much enjoyment I would get out of growing food for others and supplying seeds and information to help others grow their own food to."

John ~ “I grew up on a traditional mixed farm and this is where I developed my understanding of our modern food system. Food is the single most important commodity for human wellbeing yet it is one that we value the least. This mismatch is something I have struggled with my whole life and there is no easy answer. This is one of my three reasons for starting Heirloom Harvest, to get more people involved in growing food so they can gain a better understanding of its true value. The second reason is that home (or small scale) food production is one of the best things that people can do for the environment and the third, growing your own food is fun and rewarding.”