By Casey Neill
Three Modewarre mums are sowing seeds of friendship for themselves and their children.
Pharmacist Abbey Galbraith, lawyer Amy Brady, and occupational therapist Anna Jenkins have 10 children between them.
They’re now also responsible for thousands of sunflowers, which last summer attracted visitors from far and wide and raised $1250 each for their local CFA and the Royal Children’s Hospital.
The ambitious venture all started with Abbey seeking out like-minded mums and finding Anna and Amy.
“We did some gardening together and we got on really well,” she said.
“We continued that Wednesday morning gardening each week.
“We all live out of town. There’s an isolation component to that.
“You can often get quite housebound with kids’ nap times and all of that stuff.
“It was really lovely for our kids as well, to establish that local community.
“They are just the best of friends. They get so excited to go to each other’s houses.
“We’ve now nicknamed them ‘The Children of the Sunflowers’.
“The sunflowers have helped us to strengthen that bond.”
But it was dahlias that initially caught the imagination of these mums.
“In Winchelsea, which is close to us, a dahlia business came up. We exercised restraint,” Abbey laughed.
“That’s a business that requires year-round input. You’ve got the flowers but they die off and you dig up the tubers and sell those. It’s a lot of shed work in the winter.
“We couldn’t commit to that with everything else that we had going on.
“But that whet our appetite.”
They needed a short and sharp flowering season and sunflowers fit the bill.
“We love them, they’re beautiful, they’re grand,” Abbey said.
“Everyone knows them, everyone can identify with a sunflower rather than a dahlia.
“It was a chance for the kids to catch up, for us to catch up.
“Individually none of us would take this on, but together we can tap into this creativity we’re yearning to use and do something for ourselves and for our community.
“It takes a village and our husbands are part of that village.
“They are very good at being given jobs and doing them. They’re very supportive and encouraging.”
Abbey said they went into their first season without expectations, which was fortunate because the first year was ‘a total flop’.
“I think we planted 30,000 sunflowers,” Abbey said.
“I’m pretty sure we grew seven or eight.
“It was a steep learning curve.
“That was the really wet year. We couldn’t get into the fields so we planted them late.”
Locals pointed to the failure as proof they couldn’t achieve their dreams of a sunflower field, so they doubled down and got an agronomist involved.
“Last year they just went gangbusters,” Abbey said.
“We couldn’t believe what we produced.”
They charged $10 admission and $3 per stem to pick.
“We ran it as a business. That was a good challenge for us,” Abbey said.
“One of our main drivers was wanting to do something for a rural community to bring everyone together as well as a meeting place.
“Lots of young families have moved to the area.
“We thought there’d be an appetite for something like this for young families.”
So that’s who they pitched the experience to, but they were blown away by the response from all ages – families of teenagers, especially.
“I think it’s really hard for them to find activities that are fun for the whole family and get the teenagers off screens,” she said.
“They did take heaps of photos for their Insta, but they’re not at home gaming.
“When people came out of the paddock they had this expression of joy.
“We had a nursing home come and bring a busload of residents. They all had morning tea in the paddock.
“The look on their faces was just amazing.
“It gave us a pep in our step. It gave us self-belief.”
One visitor described how she’d spent 10 minutes watching a bee pollinate a flower.
“She just had a look of awe,” Abbey said.
“To be able to give that to people these days…
“You pay an admission fee but you get transported into a field where you can forget about the world around you and just enjoy the moment.”
When we spoke to Abbey, they’d just planted their next crop.
“We’ve prepped the paddock and got someone in to seed it this year,” she said.
“We’ve rabbit-proofed all of the fencing because the rabbits are pretty rife where we are.
“That was an activity we did with the kids and got them involved as well, which they all loved.
“Now we’re more looking into what services we’ll offer this year.
“Last year one great thing that we did was we offer professional photography sessions.
“We didn’t think about the response or the outcome of that, but that was probably a game changer with our social media.
“That gave us the content – some beautiful family photos started circulating.
“We’ll be looking at yoga in the paddock or paint and sip.
“We really want to go hard on the experience.
“People love that. It’s lacking from life sometimes so people seek that out.”
Their crop flowered in the first week of January last year, so they’ve mirrored their planting schedule with the hopes of achieving a similar timeline.
“Subject to Mother Nature,” Abbey laughed.
“The season will be 10 to 12 days. We’re just hoping for another great season.”
Surf Coast Sunflowers is at 455 Considines Road, Modewarre, just off Cape Otway Road.
