We are gardeners, farmers, winemakers, writers, poets and educators and we love sharing our skills with you. We are the authors of two books, Grown & Gathered (2016) and The Village (2018).

We began by selling our produce to some of Melbourne’s top restaurants, encouraging chefs to adopt principles of local, real produce and sustainable farming and packaging. Since then, we have embarked on a number of projects, including The Produce Van, where we pulled our van up each week in the streets of Melbourne to sell our homegrown vegetables and talk to people about sustainability and natural food, The Flower Exchange, where we grew flowers and traded them without exchanging money for a year and Minimum Wines, where we’ve converted a 125-acre vineyard into organic, regenerative management and now sell delicious wines made to nurture both the environment, and the drinker!

We currently live between Italy and Australia, spending our time creating, learning, writing poetry winemaking and experiencing all we can in the world of natural food and life. Lentil loves writing and photography, Matt growing food, winemaking and design.

READ ALL ABOUT (AND PURCHASE) BOOK #1

READ ALL ABOUT (AND purchase) BOOK #2

• We believe in the wisdom of the past. How things got done before chemicals, plastics and the very idea of waste existed.

• We believe in living thoughtfully. Knowing where things come from and where they end up.

• We believe in building community in the traditional "I can touch and smell you" sense. And in the simple, real happiness that brings.

• We believe sustainability IS A REAL THING. We have more than 3 times the agricultural land needed to feed, clothe and house the potential 11 billion person 'peak' expected to hit the planet and we have the wisdom to manage it wisely.

• We believe ecological farms can produce everything we need and restore the environment at the same time.

• We believe we can all make choices for our shared world and collective health and happiness. Sustainability is everyone's responsibility and everyone does make a difference.

• We believe in prioritising life’s fundamentals - health, food, happiness and creating a home. Let's cook from scratch, understand what wholesome, real food is, live with the seasons and know our neighbours.

• We believe organic farming should simply be called farming. It's got 60,000 colourful years of history compared to 100 years of synthetic food-raising.

• We believe everyone should grow some of their own food. Even if it's just a pot of basil. There is no more powerful an act.

• We do not believe in self-sufficiency - we believe in the village where everyone has something to contribute and everyone has something to share. No man is an island and you just can't do everything yourself. And so...

• We believe that trade without the exchange of money should be a component of every persons life. We LOVE trading and trade as much as we can, whenever we can. If you'd like to trade, please get in touch.

• And we believe that if everyone would just begin to eat truly local food that has been grown under the sun, without the use of chemicals and greenhouses, the world would be just SO MUCH closer to that better place.

• We believe we can do this. But only if we do it together.

WHAT DOES SUSTAINABILITY MEAN TO YOU?

Sustainability means the end of waste. A sustainable world would be a world where we don’t create new inputs, where all compostable waste is returned to the soil and all “hard” waste is fully repurposed. A sustainable world is a closed-loop.

DO YOU REALLY ONLY EAT SEASONALLY?

Yes we do! We believe it’s the best way for the environment but also for your body. We get so excited when new things come in season and we get so excited when we get to open our preserved jars in winter. We love it.

WHAT ARE THE KEYS TO HOW YOU EAT?

We eat mainly vegetables and fruits, lots of whole grains and beans and a little meat and dairy. We're definitely not scared of fat unless it's masquerading as margarine. We mill all of our grains fresh and ferment them before eating. We soak all our beans and other legumes before eating. We preserve and ferment fresh foods when they are abundantly in season. So our meals are generally the product of that: grains, beans, veg and some meat and cheese with a little something pickled and a little something sweet.

DO YOU EAT MEAT?

Yes. We eat little bits of very good, well produced meat:
- Meat and waste bones from local, sustainable meat producers.
- "Homegrown" meat that we've traded.
- Raise our own.
- And when we need to, we hunt our own from the wild.

DO YOU REALLY LOVE TO BARTER/TRADE FOR THINGS?

Yes!!! Seriously, the rewards trade brings are inexplicable until you've experienced them. Get in touch. We'd love to trade with you.

DO YOU REALLY NOT GENERATE ANY WASTE?

The world is the world and incidental plastic always sneaks into our life (and that makes us a bit sad). When we had our commercial vegetable and flower farm we always did our best and no waste was generated in the management of it or the making of our products. It was a closed loop from planting to harvest to fertilising and planting again and all our packaging was recycled, reusable or compostable. These days we make wine with the same ethos. You can check that out here.

Grown & Gathered is a proud partner of One Tree Planted - giving 1% of our sales (effectively 1 tree per order) to the careful preservation of the environment.

One Tree Planted is a non-profit organisation focused on global reforestation. They are on a mission to make it simple for anyone to help the environment by planting trees!

Planting trees is such a simple and effective way to make an impact. Trees clean the air we breathe and the water we drink. They help stabilise our climate, provide habitat for biodiversity, and create sustainable jobs.

We encourage you to join us - perhaps by supporting the movement yourself, or those businesses that have already done so - and give back to the one thing that gives us all so much; our planet.