About Us

What's the go?

We are a small permaculture framed market garden located in Jilliby on the NSW Central Coast. We aim to provide our local community with access to fresh, nutritious food.

At ALAN Foods, we are All Local, All Natural. We grow everything we sell and don’t outsource. So you have the confidence of knowing exactly how your food is grown and where it comes from when you shop with us.

Head to our Instagram or Facebook to see what we’re up to now. Or scroll down to see how far we’ve come!

What we sell...

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Fruit and veg varieties

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Chemicals used

Grown at our farm in Jilliby

A few snapshots of the early days at our farm in Jilliby. Way before we dreamt of having the back paddock full of veggies.

We aim to grow as much food as the seasons will possibly allow us to!

We moved to the central coast in 2014 when we were lucky enough to be able to purchase our beautiful property. It has a large back paddock which we originally mowed, and ran goats and alpacas.

Our first additions to the farm was a small flock of chickens which quickly grew. We now have a flock of 30-40 chickens and when we have surplus eggs they are available to our customers.

When we moved in there were two small overgrown veggie plots. Michael and I got to weeding and clearing out the area ready to plant our summer veggies, being complete novices at it! Call it beginners luck, but we did ok and soon we were eating fresh produce from our garden.

Michael always had a vision of growing vegetables in the entire back paddock.

Fast Forward a few years to...

2019

The beginning of Alan Foods

We were lucky enough to have some friends live with us which kick started Michael’s dream of turning the back paddock into a veggie plot. Luke and Lauren had some experience in market gardening and we all got stuck in with breaking ground.

We started with one plot which was netted to keep the birds away.

Our original bed building strategies involved a roto-tiller and the pitch forks to kill the grass. A cover crop was then planted to help build the soil nutrition and structure.

We found this method to be quite physical and ineffective in preventing grass and weed regrowth.

There were many different techniques used in the early days. From tillage to tarping and running the chickens to prepare the ground for producing food. Eventually we settled on the no-dig method which has proven to be the best method for our context so far.