Flower farm dreams bloom again

Rob and wife Shirley jumped in the deep end of the flower pool 30 years ago — initially as a sideline to pay for a pool in their backyard on a quarter-acre block in Yarrawonga, on the Victorian side of the Murray River.

And the flowers and the pool were something they could enjoy with their three young children — Lauren, Tegan and Mitchell.

“It was Shirl’s father, Alan Zotti, who got us into cut flowers in the first place,” Rob said.

“He grew chrysanthemums for the Melbourne flower market and every Mother’s Day we gave him a hand and then took the leftovers to sell in Shepparton.”

At which point he did some mental maths and reckoned the numbers added up pretty well in the plus column; so he and Shirley had officially caught the flower bug.

They became small farmers as they busied themselves with the job of flower farming, discing, banking rows of soil, laying weed mats and installing self-dripper lines.

After asking local florists what was popular with the public, they chose varieties and then, like all farmers, they battled the elements.

Shirley, a hairdresser by trade, ran a salon from their family home while raising the children and would often be delivering bunches of statice, carnations, baby’s breath, ageratum and bells of Ireland to the numerous Yarrawonga florists in between perms and colours.

“In the ’80s we sold flowers for $2 to $3 a bunch and we were selling 100 bunches a week,” Shirley said.

She said Rob would spend “eight hours a day staring at a computer screen and then come home to bunch and box flowers until midnight before meeting the V/Line bus at 6am to freight flowers to Cobram and Numurkah florists and IGAs”.

But with experience (and age) comes wisdom. After a 20-plus year break, the grandparents of eight have narrowed their sights and singled out statice as their flower of choice for their Flower Farm 2.0.

“You can hardly call us farmers — we’ve gone from being small farmers to somewhere in the micro department seeing we are only operating on about 35 square metres in town,” Rob said.

As he inspects his four new flowerbeds, he still can’t help himself, analysing the numbers on his use of manure, recalling that the first bed was a hot rich mix of chicken, cow and horse manure, that caused the flowers to grow like weeds.

“We chose statice because it is such a tough plant, is not susceptible to bugs, doesn’t need much water and is very low maintenance — they practically grow themselves,” Rob said.

He admits that all it took to get him back in the flower game was that first packet of statice seeds from Bunnings one Sunday afternoon and the discovery last year of a rusted old flower stand in Beechworth.

Clearly it was time for this retired couple to bloom again, albeit on a much more modest scale.

It’s a long way from those baby steps into the floral industry, into that swimming pool for the kids and into juggling jobs day and night, but Rob is adamant it all paid off.

Now, if all goes well in a post-COVID world, he reckons his new line of cut flowers will practically sell themselves, because like any good farm marketer, he knows the key is location, location, location.

Rob and Shirley now live next door to the sprawling Yarrawonga P-12 school campus and across the road from the Yarrawonga Cemetery.

This accountant farmer or farming accountant knows nothing in life is certain, except death and taxes.

And it can’t hurt to cash in on both.