TAS

TRAVEL TASMANIAN FARM GATES

www.caravanandrv.com.au || 79 78 || AUSTRALIAN CARAVAN+RV

WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY PHIL COOPER

Strawberry fields FOREVERAnd raspberry fields, and apple orchards, and pears and cherries and apricots and peaches... Getting fresh in Tassie

HOBART

The staff are friendly, the produce is delicious and they grow a dozen different fruits on the one site

80 || AUSTRALIAN CARAVAN+RV www.caravanandrv.com.au || 81

TRAVEL TASMANIAN FARM GATES

hen shopping for fruit, nothing beats the convenience of dropping

into your local supermarket. With kids' soccer at half past four, dinner at six and a mountain of work to finish before I hit the pillow, I don’t have time to find a green grocer. Besides, what could be better value than the supermarket? Well, that depends on your definition of 'value'. If it's how many notes you have left in your wallet, the supermarket may be the way to go. But if taste and nutrition matter, wouldn’t it be better to buy direct from a farm? Time to put that to the taste test, and where better than Tasmania?

Tasmania is known as the Apple Isle for very good reason. The climate and soil are well suited to orchards and with a vast variety of fruits in such abundance, you’re never far from a farm with worthwhile offerings. You can buy freshly picked from most of them, but for me the heart and soul are the farms where you can pick your own. Fruit doesn’t come fresher than that!

I'll never forget the excitement of ‘pick your own’ in my younger years. Sharing the harvest: one for the punnet and one for my stomach. I wondered if my eight-year-old son would share the same enthusiasm. Could fending off the occasional wasp to gather strawberries at ground level stack up against the graphics and engagement offered by today's video games? I needn’t have worried. The fresh air, the sun on your back, the smell of the strawberry field carried on a cool breeze, and the tastebud-tingling experience of eating a freshly

GAME BOY For a fun-loving kid

it's like a real-life video game,

complete with maze and fruits to

collect!

FERTILE LAND Tasmania's rich countryside and climate is ideal for growing delicious fruit

HIGH SCORE! Strawberry maze completed, while (below) the Farmers' Markets deliver a secret bonus level

W

plucked juicy strawberry – how can you beat that? And what a great way to spend a few hours – laying down some solid memories and demonstrating to my son that, as consumers, we do have a choice.

Planning this trip, I weigh up the merits of 'drive and ferry' against 'fly and hire/drive'. Surprisingly, the price of fuel from Sydney to Melbourne (return), plus ferry trips, balances evenly with three plane tickets and a six-day hire of a Euro Deluxe motorhome from Apollo. A leisurely amble down the east coast might be just the ticket,

but with the clock ticking I see no point in chewing up two days with a blast to Melbourne and back, especially with no cost advantage – so fly/drive it is. That gives us two more days relaxing on holiday.

Before embarking, I do some research – starting with Fruit Growers Tasmania (fruitgrowerstas.com.au). From their website you can download their free Farm Gate Guide (also available as an iPhone app) which details 40 fruit farms from across the state, what they grow and the services they offer. There’s also a chart showing the fruits and their seasons that should be studied carefully before you decide on which month to visit.

Our first port of call is the Sorell Fruit Farm, only a 15-minute drive from Hobart airport. The staff are friendly, the produce is delicious and, amazingly, they grow a dozen different fruits on the one site. We head into the fields and fill a large punnet

with strawberries and a bucket with enough apples to last the next few days. I had planned on spending a couple of days weighing up the difference between fresh and supermarket fruit, but there's no contest – less than an hour after our plane's rubber marks the runway, we have a clear winner. The texture and the flavour of the fresh fruit is incredible, but unfortunately the fruit doesn’t last long, because we can’t keep our hands out of the bowl.

The race may have been run and won, but this is still only day one. We have more taste tests on the itinerary, so we excitedly drive a couple of hours north.

Taking in a few random roadside stalls en route, the produce consistently re-enforces the results of our earlier taste test and we find ourselves eating smaller main meals as we graze on fruit between meals and have mixed fruit salads for dessert. Our eight-

For self-drive holidays with Apollo go to apollocamper.com/holiday. Talvor builds all of Apollo’s Euro Deluxe motorhomes, which are also available for purchase at www.talvor.com

ACCOMMODATIONDiscovertasmania.com.au lists almost 100 places to stay in a caravan/RV around the state. They also have brochures that can be downloaded. Being members, we also usedbig4.com.au as another great reference for accommodation.

We could have loaded up with fruit, but as this is our last day we eat our fill and enjoy every crunch

GET THE APPAvailable from the iTunes App Store, the Tasmanian Fruit Farm Gate Guide features over 40 farm gate locations across the island, with interactive maps, filters and note-taking features.

FREE

82 || AUSTRALIAN CARAVAN+RV

TRAVEL TASMANIAN FARM GATES

year old doesn’t even ask for anything different for dessert and I take the rapidly polished-off plate as a fair indicator that this stuff tastes good. If it can satisfy the sweet tooth of a child it must be rich in flavour!

Once you’ve done the farms you have to see the markets. It's back to Google for me and marketguide.com.au. In particular, I'm looking for farmers' markets and I get in touch with Farm Gate Markets in the greater Hobart area. The website (farmgatemarket.com.au) details when and where they do their thing. To run a stall there, you must be a local producer and not one that supplies larger outlets such as supermarkets. If it’s the grass roots of fruit production that you want to sample, add this to your list. It’s more of a local secret than a tourist

attraction, with prices, service and freshness to match. We could have loaded up with fruit, but as this is our last day we eat our fill and enjoy every crunch and fizz of flavour.

As we leave Hobart, I think of a sign I’ve seen which boasts ‘vine-ripened fruit’. We never had signs like that when I was young because everything was picked ripe before the short trip to the greengrocers. These days, large corporations have the fruit picked early, on the gamble that it will ripen during the days it takes to be delivered to the depot and out again to the shops. For my money, I prefer the old way and if you’re ever looking for an excuse to get away, do yourself a favour and head to Tasmania to track down some old-school fruit.

FRUIT MACHINE Our hired home for the trip –the Euro Deluxe. A great alternative to driving all the way from Sydney

THE TASTE SENSATIONS on offer aren’t limited to the fruit by itself. There are jams, sauces, chutneys, spreads, liqueurs, vinegars and much more