About Us
Hello everyone, we are George and Cici, the owners of Pude Farm. We are a couple born in the 1980s 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 absorbed in the online world. We want them to spend more time in nature, broaden their horizons, and experience the world deeply. So we started looking for a farm near the city, where they could discover interesting things in nature.
Secondly, like many young couples, we live overseas while our parents are in China. As our parents grow older, as only children we face the question of whether to go back or keep living here. If we bring our parents over, they need a long period of adjustment: language, climate, transport, food, medical care and culture. Many parents give up along the way, saying: "I'll come to you when I really can't move anymore." If we go back, I don't think we could adapt to working life in China any more. 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, a little about us. Before starting the farm, we built websites. When the pandemic hit, more and more people started online shops and we became busier and busier. When we couldn't keep up, AI began to emerge, and George started learning how to use AI to help us work faster – writing copy, generating images, even writing small programs. But the deeper he went into the network and the code, the more he realised this was not the life he wanted. He said he longed to be close to nature again to clear his mind. George grew up in the countryside and has countless happy memories of it: every season brought something new to play with, every day was full of adventures, and he was often told off for coming home late. His family was poor and couldn't afford toys, so he made his own from old tyres and bamboo from the grove. He hopes his children can experience the beauty of nature the way he did, and learn to cherish and protect it. So we started looking for a farm on the edge of Melbourne.
- Why we farm the natural way
As George grew older and returned to his village, he found that the stream where he used to catch fish and crabs as a child no longer had any. Years of pesticide use on the surrounding farmland had damaged the environment.
After moving to Melbourne and cooking for ourselves, we found many vegetables tough, and favourites like loofah, gourd and radish slowly disappeared from our menu. So we decided to grow our own, composting all our fruit peels and vegetable scraps, buying sheep manure and worms, and even building our own worm towers and using plant ash. When the whole garden was ready to harvest, we didn't need to buy vegetables all summer and could even share them with the neighbours. Biting into those fresh, tender vegetables, grown without pesticides or chemical fertilisers, reminded us of the taste of our childhood – something chemically fertilised vegetables can't match.
So after buying the farm, George's first principle was that we would farm the natural way, with no pesticides and no chemical fertilisers, using nature's own cycles instead of sprays, and returning to a simple, natural environment. This is where the "Pu" (朴, meaning simple and unadorned) in Pude Farm comes from.
We are currently letting chickens roam the fig orchard, where they eat insects and weeds and their manure feeds the trees, so both the eggs and the fruit are as natural as can be. The chickens run freely in the orchard and rest in the branches – we're sure they are very happy too.
