1816 is a Ballarat Bakery established in 2019, by Head Baker Josh Chapman, with owners of the Forge Pizzeria, Tim and Chris Matthews. Josh would travel to Trentham to get good quality sourdough bread. He realised there was a gap in Ballarat for a bricks-and-mortar sourdough bakery. In 2019, the first loaves came out of the oven.

Aromatic and so strongly flavoured these super juicy and intensely flavoured strawberries are the best we have seen. Yes, they cost twice as much as supermarket strawberries, but they taste 16 times as good. They are grown on a little farm at Eganstown, 5km west of our store by Peter and Clare at Morningswood Farm. They are super passionate about regenerating the soil on their small acreage and have dug in hundreds of tonnes of organic matter to enrich the earth and encourage soil biodiversity. Which leads to these most amazing strawberries!

Paul Righetti’s left-hand man is a dog. A dog called Oscar. He is a Maremma guard dog that looks after the ISA brown hens that graze on pasture on his farm outside Guildford. The birds lay eggs sold under the Honest Egg Co. label. “We don’t like to talk about free-range, because that can mean 1500 birds sitting outside a shed without a blade of grass!” explains Paul. “Instead, we see ourselves as regenerative farmers.” The flocks of birds are free to roam on fresh pasture, scratching about for seeds, insects, and small stones to help digest the grain in which they are also fed.

There is cider and then there is cider. Real cider. Cider made in the time honoured tradition using apple varieties bred for the flavour and texture, not just for sweet juice. Cider fermented slowly in a method that develops flavour.

The milk from Inglenook tastes different. It is made from a single herd of Friesian cows grazing on grass out near Dunnstown, in the volcanic hills east of Ballarat. “We don’t process it like the big multinational companies,” says Rachael Peterkin. She and her husband Troy co-founded the small family-owned milk processing facility 10 years ago.

Chris Edwards bakes some of the best pastries is the state. Trained in the traditional European methods of making croissants and Danishes in the great hotels like the Ritz in London. From his ovens in Castlemaine come light, flaky, and delicious pastries to our shelves every day.

Jason Crosbie has always been fascinated by fungus. He grew up foraging for mushrooms in the paddocks out back of Ballarat and bushwalking in the forest around Buninyong looking for wild fungus.

Autumn is here, and the lettuces have flowered. So have dandelions and plantains. The vegetable beds at Captains Creek Organics appear chaotic. But they are full of life. Bees, beetles, lizards. Grower Josh Williams encourages this chaos. “It is all about letting the natural processes go about their course,” he says.

On a bend in the road, in the historic village of Glenlyon, is a little block of land that is one of the most productive in the region. Adsum Farmhouse is a 3 acre block on which stands Edward and Fiona Benedict’s 1880s family home, a greenhouse, a pickling kitchen, storage shed and row and rows of rich deep soil.

It has been a remarkable season for tomatoes, and our organic tomato grower Florian Hofinger has been working since early spring to make sure the summer crop will be at its best. The former chef turned organic farmer has a beautiful property sitting on a saddle under the summit of Mount Franklin.