From the suburbs to sustainable farming
Stuart and Sonia Whiteman purchased their farm in the Macedon Ranges while living in the inner Suburbs of Melbourne. Having both grown up in the outskirts of Melbourne with ample space and opportunities for exploration, they sought the same for their two boys.
Having chosen the Chintin property for its stunning woodlands, lush pastures, three dams, and sweeping views of Melbourne, that first summer, as the pastures dried, they quickly realised they had acquired 140 acres of capeweed and dilapidated fences.
After 11 years of dedicated soil remediation, the Whitemans proudly maintain a herbicide and pesticide free property, with paddocks that are now predominantly pasture. This achievement is thanks to a mix of organic and regenerative farming practices.
In 2020, they planted their first test lavender patch, selecting it for its compatibility with the local environment and its drought resilience. Bees naturally became part of our farm, but they also introduced a variety of native botanicals for their essential oil production, culinary uses, and even fire-retardant properties.
After countless days and nights experimenting with lavender and native botanicals, extracting their aromas and flavours through techniques like steam distillation, vacuum distillation, and solvent extraction became second-nature.
Throughout this journey, they've enjoyed sharing their farming techniques with visitors, including innovative practices like "no weeding," distillation, and flavour explorations through the paddocks.
SONIA
I am passionate about flavour. I have always loved cooking and growing up in an Italian household only further encouraged this passion. I love to experiment and use new flavours in traditional ways. Now with 3 men in the house, my cooking is further encouraged! Discovering new scents and flavours in the plants we grow is so exciting and it’s really rewarding to try them in a variety of ways. Even failures are in some ways wins. My passion is to provide our botanicals in a way that everyone can discover them by incorporating them in our products or presenting them in a way that makes them easy for everyone to use and understand.
STUART
I am passionate about soil health and distillation. Growing up learning to drive a Fergie tractor before I could even reach the pedals ignited my love for farming. I take great satisfaction seeing the immense improvement in our soil health and I am always looking at opportunities to further encourage it’s microbiology. My background in water treatment and steam injection systems ceryainly helped me to understand the distillation process and we have two Lavender Oil awards to attest to the success of our careful distillation process. I really enjoy distilling. Each lavender season I am blown away when the first drops of lavender essential oil come drip out of the still. I do a lot of research into ways to improve the extraction process and we have customers distilling themselves now who have been taught by me.
TOM
Tom is our eldest son. He has long held a fascination for bees in particular the organisation of a hive colony and their awesome ability to produce honey. He is our lead beekeeper and came up with the idea of making smoked honey. He also helped us do our first ever Farmer’s Market and did many of them after that. He loves baking and enjoys experimenting with our native botanicals and some of our products are inspired by his experimentation.
MAX
Max is great at helping out in the paddocks. He gets stuff done, planting, mulching, weeding anything really. The distillation experiments we do suddenly became very interesting when we came home talking about extraction and polarity as his Chemistry brain was piqued and we might just have another distiller in the family. Max also loves to cook and is a great product tester and researches a lot about the best way to optimum results in the cooking processes we use.