Elizabeth and Paul Flower

Farmer rating (pending assessment by the PFA): AA
Supplying Food Connect since: 2006
Farm visited by Food Connect: No

At Marney Organic Forest Limes, Paul and Elizabeth Flower’s emus are more than just pets. They were having trouble with legumes growing up and over their lime trees, so they bought six emu chicks to keep legumes under control. As Paul puts it ‘if you want to control a native plant that is taking over, find yourself a native animal to eat it’.

The emus do a great job on the legumes, and as you can see from the photos they are always up for for a bit of extra feed. One of Paul’s favourite tricks is to sit visitors down in a circle, put some food in the centre and let the emus stand on the outside of the circle, snaking their long necks over people’s shoulders to get at the food. It’s a game that is fun for both the visitors and the emus!

Paul and Elizabeth try to make use of all the resources that are naturally available to them on their organic farm. As well as employing emus, they use a canopy of native trees rather than shade cloth to keep their limes out of the direct sunlight.

Here’s a report from Paul on the 2009 lime season:

Marney forest organic would like to say hello to all the Food Connect lime customers. We have just finished our current lime picking season. We hope you have enjoyed the fruit as much as we have had growing working and playing around with different farming systems for the limes.

We have had a wet season with barely much drying out since November last year. We had a heavy frost in autumn which destroyed about a third of the crop, but we were glad most were unscathed and look forward to new frost protection measures next year. We had a large amount of fruit from early in the season which Food Connect was helpful in taking as juicing limes. We hope to have a mechanical juicer in the future to make more use of the softer yellow fruit.

The fruit is always slower growing in winter and gets bumpier and accumulates more scratches and blemishes. But there are fewer insects to worry the fruit, and as organic producers we would rather live with the cold and manage the risk of frost than have to dodge insects.

It was incredible to visit a lime grower who received more than 30% more per box than us because of the spotless shiny fruit that are scrubbed and then covered with a wax and fungicide. The water soluble fungicide is legally not supposed to be mixed in the wax but it commonly is. This makes it impossible to wash off in water! When I suggested that it wasn’t such a great idea the reply was that nearly all fruit is treated with a post harvest fungicide and if consumers became stirred up about it would challenge the basic practice of storing fruit and that we would only be able to supply in season fruits!

The conventional market for limes is driven completely by the appearance of the fruit. We concluded that judging fruit by appearance alone was naïve and that we all need to know the stories behind the farming and supply of our food. This is where Food Connect is way ahead of the pack. Every piece of food has a story and some of them are not that appealing.

We will continue to use new boxes to send our limes and use simple rot prevention strategies such as gentle handling, cleaning with soft cloths and keeping the stylar end of the fruit (the pointy end) intact. We have trees flowering now which we hope will survive the spring frosts and produce fruit before Christmas so until then, cheers for now.

P.S. Marney Forest Lime Cordial Syrup is available through Food Connect.