FAMILY business Royston Petrie Seeds in Mudgee, NSW, deals in the flavours of yesteryear – heirloom variety seedlings.
Production manager Daniel Lewis said the business was named after his wife Rowena’s late father Royston Petrie.
“Royston was in the seed business since the 1950s and set up his own business in 1976,” Mr Lewis says.
“Rowena never really left the business and now she has been in it longer than him, seeing as she grew up in that environment and her knowledge of seeds is second to none, which built and grew into experience.”
He said he joined in the family business in 2001 before they moved from Sydney to Mudgee a year later.
“We moved due to the urban sprawl in Sydney - we were pushed out and we outgrew our two-hectare property in Sydney,” he says.
“We moved so we could grow a wider range of things.”
Mr Lewis says Petrie Seeds has a massive focus on growing and distributing heirloom variety seeds.
“We are a wholesale supplier of seeds to revegetation companies, forestry plantation companies, nurseries and the general public,” he says.
“Our stocks include Australian native trees and shrubs, native grasses, vegetable seeds, exotics, flowers, proteas and herb seeds.”
Mr Lewis says they deal with hundreds of kilograms per variety of seed on offer.
“We try to stock everything that comes from a seed to a bulb,” he says.
“We want to grow more here as customers acquire more seeds.”
Because there is a restriction on the importation of heirloom tomato seeds, there is an opportunity to grow and sell them.
“Tomatoes can harbour the tomato swindle virus, so we have the seeds tested before we import them,” Mr Lewis says.
“We also grow onions, poppies, lucerne seeds (in the winter) and have started growing chillis.”
About 300 kilograms of open pollinated onions were harvested in mid-January and sent to
another seed company on the Central Coast that exports.
“We have a 1000 chilli plants grown, which (condiments supplier) Linda Wilson sources for her sweet chilli relish products,” he said.
“We also have a lady who uses our rosella flowers to make her indigenous-based food products.”
He said heirloom tomatoes are not a hybrid variety like most commonly found on supermarket shelves.
“Our tomatoes are openly pollinated, which means they’re not interfered with or cross pollinated,” he says.
“A hybrid is genetically modified and crossed with others.”
Mr Lewis said these types of tomatoes would have naturally occurred in the 1950s to 1970s.
“You don’t regularly see them in supermarkets because they don’t have a great shelf life,” he said.
“Th ey’re good for the home gardener or what the bigger broader acre farmer would grow.”
Mr Lewis says last year they grew 80,000 (oxheart) tomatoes and 13,000 this year were harvested in March.
He says they are what you would call good old traditional tomatoes, because “the genetics haven’t been altered in any way”.
“Instead of being designed to be picked at one time, we can pick the tomatoes three to four times over the season.”
Mr Lewis said the seeds were usually found in hardware stores.
