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Working her fledgling avocado orchard just out of Gisborne was an opportunity to immerse herself in healing after the death of her son, says grower, Chris Fraser
Gisborne grower puts her heart into it Chris and Daniel Fraser knew they could grow great avocados, they just didn't know how fast that would happen – or that it would help heal their heart break. KRISTINE WALSH reports.
Chris Fraser was not alone in having produced a bumper 2021 haul of avocados, but her crop was more unexpected than most. “We had only planted the trees in 2018 and just three years in, I didn’t expect to see anywhere near this much,” she says. “Then again, there’s been a lot of heart go into this orchard.” The orchard is on Willows Road, less than ten kilometres from the centre of Gisborne. Chris and husband Dan had bought the four-hectare site in 2016 and together created avocado-friendly 40
The ORCHARDIST : FEBRUARY 2022
hollows and humps on the flat land around their home. After waiting for two years for their order of 1000 Hass-on-Bounty trees, by winter of 2018 they were ready to get planting, planning to run the orchard while maintaining full-time jobs in town. But life, as it does, took a turn. In July of 2018 Chris’s mother died, followed by her uncle then, devastatingly, her father. Then, a year to the month after burying her mother, Chris and Dan’s “charming, gorgeous” 21-year-old son, Toby, died by suicide.
Having survived those early chaotic, catastrophic months after losing Toby, Chris’s response was to step outside into the orchard. “Life became a bit of a blur, like living in a fog, so I just pushed through and did what I could on my good days,” Chris says. “But I simply can’t talk about the orchard without talking about Toby. He was such a wonderful son and friend and he has been with me every second of every day spent working my grief out in the soil.” Before those awful years, Chris and Dan brought a wealth of experience to their budding venture.
