About Us

Hello everyone, we are George and Cici, the owners of Pudie Farm. We are a post-80s couple from Zhejiang, China, and we warmly welcome you to our farm.

• Why buy a farm?

There are many reasons why we bought a farm.

First, we have three energetic boys at home. I remember in our old house, with a plot of over 800 square meters, our kids could climb onto the roof and dig a human-sized hole in the ground. (Please watch the rooftop play)

"Three Adventurers" A boy who wants to fly... fulfill his dream with a plastic bag!

Like all parents, we don't want our children to be too addicted to the online world. We want them to have more contact with nature, broaden their horizons, and deeply experience the world. So we started looking for a farm in the suburbs, where they could find interesting things in nature.

Secondly, like many young couples, we are overseas while our parents are in China. As our parents gradually age, as post-80s only children, we face the question of whether to return or continue living in this land. If we bring our parents over, they will need a long period of adjustment: language, climate, transportation, food, medical care, culture, and a series of adaptation processes. Many parents give up during this process, saying: "I'll come to you when I really can't move anymore." If we go back, I think we would no longer be able to adapt to the workplace life in China. So, after much thought, we decided to buy a farm. Our parents would have more to do on a farm than in a house, and wouldn't be so bored.

Finally, let's talk about us. Before we started the farm, my husband and I worked in web development. With the outbreak of the pandemic, more and more people started e-commerce websites, and we also became increasingly busy. When we couldn't keep up, AI started to emerge. George began to learn and research how to use AI to help us complete our work faster, writing copy, generating images, and so on. He would also use AI to write some programs. However, the deeper he went into this network and code, the more he realized this was not the life he wanted. At that time, he said he longed to connect with nature to cleanse his soul. George grew up in the countryside and has countless beautiful memories of it: the changing of the seasons always brought different things to play with; from dawn to dusk, it was always exciting, often resulting in a scolding for coming home late. He was poor then and couldn't afford ready-made toys, so he made his own with discarded tires, bamboo from the bamboo forest... these were all his toy materials. He hopes his children can also experience the beauty of nature and spontaneously cherish and protect it, just like he did when he was a child. So, we started looking for a suburban farm in Melbourne.

• The original intention of establishing an organic farm

As George grew older, when he returned to the countryside, he found that the stream where he used to catch fish and crabs as a child no longer had any small fish or crabs. That was because the long-term use of pesticides in the farmland had damaged the ecological environment.

After coming to Melbourne and cooking for ourselves, we found that many vegetables were tough. Loofah, gourds, and radishes, some of our favorite dishes, slowly disappeared from our menu. So we decided to grow our own vegetables, collecting all the fruit peels and vegetable leaves—for composting. We bought sheep manure and worms, and even made our own worm towers and plant ash, which were all great helpers for our vegetable patch. When the yard was full of harvested vegetables, and we didn't have to go out to buy vegetables in the summer, and could even share them with our neighbors, the fresh and tender taste of the vegetables made us exclaim that organic vegetables truly reminded us of the taste of our childhood, something that chemical-fertilized vegetables could not compare to.

So, after buying the farm, George's first principle was that we must be an organic farm, using nature's natural cycles instead of various chemicals, to return to our original simple natural environment. This is also the origin of "Pudie Farm" – "Pudie" meaning simple and rustic.

We are currently experimenting with putting chickens in the fig orchard, letting them eat the insects and weeds in the orchard. The chicken manure will fertilize the orchard, making both the eggs and the fruit pure and organic. The chickens can run freely in the orchard and rest on the branches, completely at ease. We believe they are also incredibly happy.