Blooming Lovely

There’s something magical about this prolific market garden in suburban Geelong

- Jana Holmer

Magic Meadow, Lovely Banks: it all sounds a bit Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm but there’s no trace of Shirley Temple in Deb Parsons’ busy five-acre (two-hectare) market garden in the northwest Geelong suburb of Lovely Banks.

Once mainly farmland, Lovely Banks is fast becoming a residential area thanks to its handy position close to the Princes Highway and overlooking Geelong. But the Parsons’ farm, Magic Meadow, run along organic and sustainable lines, has little to do with the encroaching suburbanisation.

Besides managing the property and its vegetable gardens, Deb mentors the would-be farmers among her neighbours in growing their own produce, runs breadmaking workshops — traditional wood-fired sourdough, to be exact — and makes her own gourmet feta and preserves.

She also harvests honey from her own beehives (her bees source some of their pollen from a neighbour’s olive orchard) while her cattle provide milk for the family as well as beef, from which Deb makes her own sausages.

Deb puts her farming instincts down to her Maltese grandparents. “We always had a garden and we always did something in the garden,” she says. “Gardening has always been in my blood from generation to generation.”

The local clay soil needed a couple of years’ treatment with manure and lime before Deb could plant anything. Now, Magic Meadow uses a combination of raised beds and aquaponic tanks fertilised by the manure of rainbow trout, which are harvested every November.

Herbs including parsley, dill, basil and mint are grown in the aquaponics tanks while the main seasonal veggie crops are tomatoes, eggplants, capsicum and spring onions in summer, and cauliflower, kale, cabbage and broccoli in winter.