Our story — Meet Adam
I grew up in Chengdu watching my grandfather tend a courtyard garden about four metres square. Every centimetre was used. He composted kitchen scraps, saved seed in paper envelopes, and watered by hand with a recycled tin. When I moved to Australia in 2009 and eventually settled near Geelong, I carried that same habit with me. The backyard of our rental on Separation Street became a test site for whatever I could grow in containers. It was small-scale and a bit chaotic, but it taught me what actually works in Victorian conditions and what just looks good in a catalogue.
Before Ferndale Co, I spent eleven years working in logistics and supply chain, mostly coordinating freight between Melbourne and regional Victoria. My partner Mei studied industrial design at RMIT and spent several years doing product development for a hardware importer in Dandenong. We met at a community garden in Newtown, Geelong, in 2015, arguing over the best way to stake tomatoes. She had the design eye, I knew how to move product and read a supplier contract. For a long time those two skill sets stayed in separate jobs. It took a while to figure out they belonged together.
The decision happened in March 2021. We had driven up to Orange for a weekend and stopped at a small nursery outside Millthorpe. The owner was retiring and had no one to take over her supplier relationships, including a terracotta importer she had used for over a decade and a seed grower near Mudgee who produced about 400 kilos of native mix per season. We spent the drive home talking numbers on a notepad. By May we had registered the business, placed a first order, and converted our garage in Geelong into a packing and dispatch space. Ferndale Co started from that nursery car park conversation, not from a grand plan.
We run everything from Geelong. Mei handles product design and supplier liaison, I manage operations, dispatch, and the numbers. We ship across Australia and have a small stockist in Bowral and another in Bega. The garage has given way to a proper warehouse unit on Separation Street, about 180 square metres, which we moved into in early 2023. It is still the two of us plus a small team. We are not trying to be the biggest garden brand in the country. We just want the things we sell to be worth buying.
— Thanks for being here. — Adam, Adam Yao Guo Chen
Journal
Where our wildflower seeds actually come from
Mei drove to a grower outside Daylesford to check whether our wildflower seed mix was actually worth selling.
Last month Mei drove up to a small seed grower outside Daylesford while I stayed back in Geelong to pack orders. She came home with muddy boots, about 40 photos of paddocks, and a lot of opinions about which seed lots were worth buying. The grower, a retired botanist who has been collecting and cleaning native seed for about 22 years, runs maybe 12 hectares of open-grown plots. No irrigation. The idea is that plants stressed by dry summers produce seed with better germination rates than pampered ones, and after seeing his germination data I am inclined to believe him.
What Mei was checking, because this is the kind of thing she notices and I would have missed, is whether the species ratios in each mix actually reflect what grows naturally in the Victorian volcanic plains. A lot of wildflower mixes sold in Australia are just whatever germinates fastest and photographs well. She counted the species listed on his seed tickets against a reference list from the Royal Botanic Gardens and found 11 of the 14 species in the mix we wanted are genuinely indigenous to the Geelong and Ballarat corridor. That felt honest enough.
The species we ended up sourcing for our Native Wildflower Seed Mix include chocolate lily, yellow paper daisy, and native flax, among others. These are not the showiest plants in the world but they are genuinely suited to the dry summers and clay soils a lot of our customers in regional Victoria and southern NSW are dealing with. The grower was also pretty direct about which species he would not sell us because his stocks were too low to sell responsibly. I appreciated that.
Getting the moisture content right for long-term storage was the last thing to sort out before we listed the mix. Seeds stored above about 8 percent moisture content start losing viability within months. We tested three batches using a seed moisture meter we borrowed from a friend who grows canola near Inverleigh, and all three came in under 7 percent. The grower heat-seals his packets in a small room with a dehumidifier running, which is not glamorous but it works.
We placed an initial order of 200 units and sold through 140 of them in the first six weeks, mostly to people in Geelong, the Bellarine, and a surprising number in the ACT. The seed grower is already talking to us about a late-autumn lot. Mei has already said she wants to go back up and see the paddocks in flower before that conversation happens.
How we use the planter set through winter months
Two winters of container gardening in a Geelong courtyard taught us some specific things about drainage and what actually survives.
We live in a rental in Newtown, which means no garden beds, just a concrete courtyard about 18 square metres and a north-facing balcony that gets good sun from about 10am. So we have been running a low-key long-term experiment in our own Evergreen Planter Sets for the last two winters. I want to write down what actually worked because the product description on our site is fine but it does not tell you the specific things that matter when you are gardening in pots through a Geelong winter.
The main thing is drainage. Geelong winters are wetter than people outside the region expect, and clay-based potting mixes hold water longer than they should when temperatures drop below 10 degrees. We now add about 20 percent perlite to whatever potting mix we are using, and we prop the planters up on small rubber feet so water can actually exit the drainage holes. Without that, we lost two kale seedlings and a whole tray of silverbeet in June last year before we figured out what was happening.
For what to actually plant: broad beans go in around late April and they are reliable. We are growing Coles Dwarf this year, which is compact enough for the medium planter and sets pods well without needing staking. Mei planted garlic in the large planter in late May, about 18 cloves of Monaro Purple from a grower at the Geelong Farmers Market, and they are already showing green tips. The planters hold heat reasonably well overnight because they are thick-walled, and we have not had any frost damage yet even on the nights that got down to 3 degrees.
The solar lights we sell are doing something useful here too. We ran a string of them along the balcony railing and they are on for about 4 hours after dark, which is enough to see what you are doing when you go out to water or check on things at night. They are not grow lights, they do not affect the plants, but they make the whole courtyard feel less like a storage area and more like somewhere worth spending time even in July.
One honest note: the planters do show water marks on the exterior after a wet winter. It is mineral residue from the potting mix and it wipes off with a damp cloth and a small amount of white vinegar. We probably should have put this in the care instructions from the start. It is on the list.
A Tuesday in the spare room that is our warehouse
The warehouse is a spare bedroom with a folding table, and packing 30 orders on a Tuesday is a two-person job with a clear division of labour.
People sometimes ask if we have a warehouse. We do not. We have a spare bedroom in our house in Newtown that has gradually been taken over by stock, bubble wrap, a label printer, and one of those folding tables from Bunnings that we keep saying we will replace with something better. On a busy Tuesday we might pack 30 to 45 orders, and it takes both of us because Mei is faster at folding boxes and I am faster at printing labels and cross-checking addresses. It is not a system we designed so much as one that evolved from us arguing about who was doing what.
The shovel is the hardest thing to pack. The Aussie Garden Shovel is 95cm long and we cannot fit it in a standard satchel, so it goes in a custom-length cardboard sleeve we order from a packaging supplier in Dandenong. Each sleeve costs about $1.40 and we go through roughly 60 a month. We tried a cheaper option from a different supplier earlier this year and had three shovels arrive bent at the handle because the cardboard was too light. We went back to the Dandenong supplier immediately.
Mei does most of the product photography and website work. I do the packing, the supplier relationships, and the spreadsheets. This division made sense when we started because she came out of graphic design and I had spent 8 years in supply chain at a logistics company in Melbourne before we moved to Geelong. But it has blurred over time. She now knows more about freight rates than she ever wanted to, and I have strong opinions about font choices, which is not ideal for anyone.
We use Australia Post for most orders and a courier for anything over 5kg or going to a rural address where the transit times are genuinely better. The solar lights go as a set in a single box and we pack them with recycled paper fill rather than foam because the foam was getting expensive and the paper works just as well for products that are not fragile. We started collecting and reusing cardboard from our own deliveries about six months ago and it has cut our packaging spend by around $80 a month, which is not huge but it adds up.
The spare room will probably stay as it is for another year. We have looked at a few small commercial spaces in North Geelong but the rent does not make sense yet at our current volume. When we are consistently above 600 orders a month we will revisit it. We are at about 380 right now.
Getting the garden sorted before Geelong turns cold
A dry week in mid-March finally gave us the chance to reset the courtyard before the cold arrived, and it mostly went to plan.
Every year around mid-March I tell myself I will get the courtyard sorted before it gets cold, and every year I am doing it in the rain in May. This year I actually managed it. We had a run of dry days in the third week of March, which is unusual for Geelong where the autumn break can come early, and I spent about 3 hours across two evenings clearing out the summer pots and getting everything ready for the cooler months. Writing it down here partly because it was satisfying and partly so I remember what worked.
The summer tomatoes in the large Evergreen planters had been done since February. Two plants of Tommy Toe cherry tomato and one Tigerella, and the Tigerella was the standout this year, probably 2kg of fruit off a single plant. I pulled the spent plants, shook most of the old potting mix into a bag for composting, and refilled with a fresh mix cut with some of the perlite we bulk-buy from a landscape supplies place on the Surf Coast Highway. The roots had completely filled the bottom third of each planter, which tells me the sizing is right for indeterminate tomatoes.
Mei replanted the medium planters with seedlings she had been growing on the windowsill: two varieties of kale, a row of spring onions, and some flat-leaf parsley that has been in continuous production for nearly 18 months now from the same plant. The parsley is remarkable. It was a seedling from the Geelong Farmers Market and it has survived two winters, a hot January, and several weeks of inconsistent watering. We have started telling people about it whenever anyone asks what is worth growing in pots.
We reset the solar lights at the same time. The batteries in two of the four units had dropped noticeably in output after about 14 months of use, which is roughly what the specs suggest. We replaced those two battery packs, which take a standard 18650 cell available at any electronics supplier, and all four units are now running at full brightness again. The panels needed a wipe down with a damp cloth. That was genuinely all they needed.
The courtyard looks better now than it did all summer. There is something about the autumn light in Geelong, lower and softer, that makes container gardens look more considered than they actually are. The broad beans are already in. Coles Dwarf again, 24 seeds across two planters, and the first shoots came up in 9 days.
Customer reviews
Sarah K. — Brunswick, VIC — 2024-03-14 — 5/5
Solid planters, fast delivery
Ordered the Evergreen Planter Set on a Tuesday and it was on my doorstep by Thursday — wasn't expecting that at all. The pots are sturdy and the sizing is exactly as described. Already repotted my monstera into the largest one and it looks great.
Tom B. — New Farm, QLD — 2024-06-22 — 4/5
Good lights, setup took a minute
The Solar-Powered Garden Lights look really good along my front path. Setup wasn't complicated but the instructions could be a bit clearer on the stake depth. Once I figured it out they've been working well every night.
Priya M. — Surry Hills, NSW — 2024-08-05 — 5/5
Native seed mix is the real deal
Bought the Native Wildflower Seed Mix after seeing it recommended in a local gardening group. Germination rate has been really good — I'd say about 80% of what I planted came through within three weeks. Packaging was simple and clearly labelled with each species.
James R. — Fremantle, WA — 2024-09-18 — 4/5
Shovel does the job well
The Aussie Garden Shovel feels well-balanced and the steel head is noticeably thicker than what I had before. Took six days to arrive in Fremantle which is fine. I'd have given five stars but the handle had a small rough patch near the grip — nothing a quick sand couldn't fix.
Claire W. — Hobart, TAS — 2024-11-30 — 5/5
Water-Saving Hose Set — worth every cent
I was sceptical about whether this hose set would make a real difference but my water usage is noticeably down after a month of using it. Connectors are solid and didn't drip at all on first use. Delivery to Hobart was quicker than I expected too.
Marcus D. — Fitzroy, VIC — 2025-01-09 — 5/5
Great gift, well packaged
Ordered the Evergreen Planter Set with the gift-wrap option for my mum's birthday. The kraft box and card looked genuinely nice — she was impressed. Delivery was on time and the handwritten note was a thoughtful touch I wasn't expecting for a $7 add-on.
Anita S. — West End, QLD — 2025-02-14 — 4/5
Lights work well, one unit had a fault
Ordered four solar lights and three of them have been flawless. One didn't charge properly from day one — emailed Ferndale Co and they sent a replacement within a few days, no fuss. Good customer service and the lights themselves look great in the garden.
Owen F. — Norwood, SA — 2025-04-02 — 5/5
Reliable gear, no complaints
Picked up the Aussie Garden Shovel and the Water-Saving Hose Set in one order. Both arrived together in good condition and were well packed — no damage at all. The hose connectors in particular feel like they'll last a long time. Would order from Ferndale Co again.
Shipping
We ship all Ferndale Co orders Australia-wide using Australia Post for standard delivery and StarTrack for express. Standard delivery typically takes 3–8 business days, while express is 1–3 business days. Orders placed before 2pm AEST Monday to Friday are dispatched the same day. Orders placed after that cutoff or on weekends go out the next business day. You'll receive a tracking number by email as soon as your order leaves our Geelong workshop. Free standard shipping applies automatically to all orders over $120. For orders under that threshold, standard shipping starts at $9.95 and express at $14.95, calculated at checkout based on weight and destination.
Delivery times to regional and remote postcodes — including parts of WA, NT, and western Queensland — may extend beyond our standard estimates. We'd suggest allowing a couple of extra business days if you're in a rural area. All prices on our website are inclusive of GST, and your tax invoice will show the GST component separately. We pack orders carefully to reduce transit damage: larger items like the Evergreen Planter Set and hose sets are wrapped in recycled paper padding and placed in double-walled cardboard boxes. We avoid single-use plastic where possible.
If your order arrives damaged, take photos of the packaging and the item before doing anything else and contact us at hello@ferndaleco.com.au within 48 hours of delivery. We'll lodge a claim with Australia Post or StarTrack on your behalf and arrange a replacement or refund. We don't ask you to return a damaged item before we act — just send us the photos and we'll sort it from there. For large or heavy items such as bulk planter sets, a signature may be required on delivery; if you'd prefer authority to leave, you can note that at checkout.
Returns
You have 30 days from the date your order is delivered to request a return. To be eligible, items must be unused, in their original packaging, and accompanied by proof of purchase. To start a return, email hello@ferndaleco.com.au with your order number and a brief description of why you're returning the item. We'll confirm receipt within 1 business day and provide a return address. Return postage is at the customer's expense unless the item is faulty or was sent incorrectly by us, in which case we'll provide a prepaid label.
Your rights under the Australian Consumer Law (ACL) apply to every purchase from Ferndale Co. If a product has a major fault, is not fit for its described purpose, or doesn't match what was advertised, you're entitled to a repair, replacement, or refund — regardless of our 30-day window. For minor faults, we'll offer a repair or replacement first. These statutory rights sit alongside our standard returns policy and are not limited by it. If you believe your situation falls under ACL consumer guarantees, just say so in your email and we'll treat it accordingly.
Certain items cannot be returned under our standard policy: opened Native Wildflower Seed Mix packets and other consumables are excluded once the seal is broken, for both hygiene and biosecurity reasons. Items that have been used, modified, or damaged through normal wear or misuse are also not eligible for a change-of-mind return. Once we receive and inspect a returned item, refunds are processed to your original payment method within 5–7 business days. You'll get an email confirmation when the refund is on its way. If you haven't received it after 7 business days, check with your bank before contacting us — processing times can vary.