YOUR INDUSTRY
GROWING NOW FIRMLY SECOND NATURE Words by Helena O’Neill Then we have everything ourselves as fresh.” Supplying their own produce to local people is hugely rewarding for Dave and Kathy. “We’ve stayed seasonal – Southland actually has a winter. We can’t grow broccoli all year round, it's just not possible, but we tend to grow the varieties we can until late April. Once you get into May then we start getting frosts.” To help with the cooler climate, three 20-metre-long tunnel houses are used for propagating brassicas and pumpkins. “Because our summer is so short, I start them off in there before planting them out.” The business did not escape the effects of last year’s nationwide lockdown.
Dave Wilson with his produce
A long-loved pillar of Southland’s community, loyalty and hard work has helped Wilson’s Veges weather the pandemic and other unsettling events over the years. Dave and Kathy Wilson are the force behind the Lochielbased market gardens. The bulk of their produce is sold at their roadside shop on the Winton-Invercargill Highway, and the family regularly attends the Southern Farmers Market in Invercargill. The business has come a long way from its early days when Dave brought home swedes and sold them at a roadside stall outside the family farm. That eventually developed into growing and selling his own vegetables from that roadside stall before building the shop in 1993. The shop now sells a wide range of fresh vegetables grown on the farm as well as fruit sourced in Invercargill and essentials like milk and eggs. “We have spinach, fennel, kohlrabi (German turnip), we do a lot of stuff that supermarkets don’t actually have. It just gives us a full variation,” Dave says. “I decided that I would have a go at growing everything that I can. It keeps me out of the wholesale system and it means that I only have to go to town to buy the bananas and apples and things that I can’t grow. 54 NZGROWER : JUNE 2021
“We got shut down, we opened up three days later for orders. We already had a website … we actually got swamped with orders after about three days. We were starting to pick 10 days ahead of ourselves with the panic buying.” “Once we got into the box orders we were away again.” Many locals were keen to avoid going into town during the lockdown so demand remained for box orders while restrictions around trading were in place. “We were well-supported afterwards as well. We did a lot of box orders, and with some couriers shut down or doing limited routes so we clocked up quite a few kilometres. We were delivering orders everywhere.”
We have spinach, fennel, kohlrabi (German turnip), we do a lot of stuff that supermarkets don’t actually have. It just gives us a full variation Dave says a lot of leftover produce was donated to the wider Southland community through charities. “We probably gave away over 1,500 boxes of veges. We also did two or three loads to Queenstown. I didn’t want to see anything go to waste.”
