The vegetables at Five Serves Produce are cultivated by passionate grower Alice Warner and her team. The farm aims to be a welcoming place where the local community can meet their farmer and learn more about how their food is grown.
Because our vegetables are only picked the day before they are available to you, the nutritional value and flavour is superior to many other vegetables you may have eaten before. You might even find yourself liking something you always hated after tasting it from our farm!
Another equally important aim of our farm is to steward and care for the land on which we grow our produce and to reduce food miles. Why buy vegetables from overseas when they are available year-round right here in your own backyard?
Food is produced in an ecologically responsible way and only organic farming practices are used. This ensures that the soil microbes, the flora and fauna in the river nearby and the local community who eat the food, benefit from the existence of the farm and are not harmed by it.
We try to reduce the use of plastic wherever possible and minimise packaging of our vegetables. When items do need to be packaged we use biodegradable corn starch based plastics or recyclable cardboard punnets. If you choose to come to the farm to collect your produce we encourage you to bring re-usable shopping bags or boxes. Where the use of plastic is necessary on the farm we avoid single-use plastics and buy better quality materials that last longer.
We don’t use any synthetic fertilisers, herbicides or pesticides and we limit the use of fossil fuels and tillage as much as possible. At this stage, it is not possible for us to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and tillage altogether and remain a viable business – and our number one aim is to be a sustainable local resource for our customers.
Alice, who was a primary school teacher for 10 years before making the switch to study sustainable agriculture and begin farming, loves nothing more than to encourage others to learn about where and how their food is grown. Visits to the farm on vegetable pick up days or at seasonal on-farm events are a great time to ask questions and see for yourself what’s happening in the field. Alice can also advise you on vegetable growing in your own home garden as she had a backyard veggie patch for years before taking the leap into growing veggies on a larger scale.
Our weekly newsletters give you the chance to find out what’s going on at the farm and include seasonal recipes and vegetable storage tips matched to the vegetables included in the share for that week. Our newsletter signup form is located at the bottom of our site.
Find out more about vegetable shares and the CSA program here.