A local berry farm with bigger things in mind

Tuckerberry Hill, founded in 1976, is a family-owned and run farm in Drysdale, sprawling across three hectares with views overlooking Port Phillip Bay.

For decades, it has been the local go-to farm for blueberry and strawberry picking on the Bellarine Peninsula, but the berry farm’s vision goes well beyond berry picking.

Christine and David Lean took over the family farm in 2000 after Christine’s mother passed away, and ever since have been fostering a tight-knit community that celebrates growers and makers, sustainability, education, and berries.

During the winter months you can sit at the café and enjoy live music, local treats, home-brewed beer or browse through products and produce from local makers.

In summer, the farm is alive with blueberry and strawberry picking, sustainability workshops, art exhibitions and markets filled with produce grown in local market-gardens – a family-run oasis for the local community.

Christine said her parents, Margret and John Tucker, started the farm simply because of Margret’s passion for growing blueberries, not because it was a practical vision.

“They started growing blueberries because that’s what my mum got interested in in 1976 and had been growing them in central Victoria, but nobody really knew about blueberries in those days, so nobody was really buying them in the markets.”

“They weren’t a go to fruit like they are today, so she was receiving very little money for them and was having to drive here from the centre of Victoria to the markets with all the fruit.”

“She had a little shop and buckets and started doing pick your own berries.

“Gradually, people started to understand what blueberries were, so in 1984 the berries were getting into bigger bushes, so as well as taking them into the markets she would have a pick your own.”

“People would come in, take a bucket and go down and pick their own berries then come up and pay for them.

“We’ve continued that and now we’re only pick your own.”

Today, the farm still grows blueberries, and strawberries, and various other fruits with a number of small orchards.

But while Chris said she was keeping her mother’s love of berries alive, the vision for Tuckerberry Hill had grown since she took the farm over.

“The berry picking is there and makes our money for us, but I’m passionate about education.

“At the moment we’ve got the pick your own, the local produce market, the local café, and there’s also a new unique hand brewed beers, blueberry beers, it’s call Brewberry Beers.”

“it’s just on site at the moment, we’ve got 11 different varieties of beer being brewed on site at the moment and we’re going to can one of them so people will be able to take it away.”

At Tuckerberry Hill, everything is grown chemical-free, with pests managed the old-fashioned way – picking slugs, elephant weevils and caterpillars off the plants by hand.

“David’s passionate about planting trees and the environment, and I don’t think I’m overestimating to say he’s planted over one million trees in his lifetime on all our farms, any farm he can get onto or public land.”

Next to the farm, the couple have worked with the council to plant out a number of native trees and plants, which they hope will become a scenic bushland walk.

In keeping with their sustainable ethos, about a decade ago Christine started up the Bellarine Peninsula Growers and Producers Association, a local produce market and not-for-profit.

“And my passion is getting people in the Bellarine Peninsula producing food on their land rather than just sitting on it and running a couple of horses and doing nothing else much on it.”

“My real passion, it is to build community. A place where people come and know other people and to belong. It’s really great to see people come and say ‘G’day how are you going? I haven’t seen you for a week or two’, it’s people who know each other. Especially on market weekends, consumers and producers.”

At Tuckerberry Hill, Chris and Dave also run educational workshops for anyone looking to learn more about sustainability, market gardens and growing.

As a retired teacher, Chris is now planning to run more in-school educational programs for students to get real-life insight into farming sustainably.

“Sustainability is one of the big areas in the Australian curriculum and they could study and get involved in sustainability in the farm, and my objective was to work with the teachers to build a curriculum around what they are wanting to teach the students.”

With all its grand ventures, Tuckerberry Hill is still very much a family affair, and while Chris and Dave’s four children all have careers of their own, the children and grandchildren are all known to help out around the farm.

“Children pick their own careers, and I’ve always been very careful not to interrupt their careers… but they’re my sounding boards, although they don’t physically help out they’re the ones that I go to, one of them will help me with the website, one will help with social media, one of them will do odd job for me.

“And we’ve got a little art gallery here, because we’ve got a daughter who is an art curator.

“So they can each have an activity on the farm that’s theirs, they’ve got something that means something to them.

“And their children, my grandchildren, they help out in the café a bit.”