On Des Kidman’s first day at the Adelaide Hills flower farm he and his wife Ange had purchased, he took a phone call from a customer asking what type of flowers they had available that morning.
Des and Ange Kidman enjoy the social aspects of flower farming – a contrast to their former life growing potatoes
“Pink ones and red ones” was about all the detail he could muster. He’d never seen a protea. The pair were no strangers to selling flowers, but these varieties were completely new to them. Ange had to label the buckets with the flowers’ names until Des became familiar with what was what.
When they were married, Des was employed by Ange’s father on his potato farm at Mount Gambier. A few years later, they expanded, moving north of Parilla in the Murray Mallee.
The property happened to have a 16-acre Geraldton wax plantation. Ange, a trained nurse, was too far from a hospital to work, so she took over the flowers.
“We did that for about six years and found the thing we loved most was growing flowers, and potatoes became too hard,” Ange says.
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