We grow vegies in healthy soil
for hyper-local eaters

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Huzzah!
We’re happy you’re here!

Let us dust the dirt off, shake your hand and welcome you to Happy Underground, the petite market garden with tons o’ heart!

Coaxed into existence on a patch of pasture borrowed from buddies, and situated on the land of Dhudhuroa people (Yackandandah), Happy Underground is an experiment in doing things kinda differently, an exercise in creating a market garden that is free to express its own cultural, ecological and geographic identity.

It’s all about keeping our inputs hyper-local (we go wild for the buckets of kitchen scraps our neighbours send for our compost heaps and worm farms!), our labour human-powered (that includes our bicycle delivery vehicles!), the birds and bugs happy and our vegies the way nature intends them (yes, sometimes our carrots have an extra leg…or two).

Doing things differently

 

Human-scale

In the world of market gardens, we are teensy - just 400 square metres of growing space, which provides veg for about 20 local families.

We keep things tiny on purpose - we want to be able to tend the patch using only hand tools, on a part-time basis, to leave time and energy in our lives for community, neighbours, family and bicycle ADVENTURING!

Fossil fuel-free

Our veg travel the 6km between the Happy Underground patch and our customers in style - by electric bike!

We choose a fossil fuel-free future for our community, which means all our inputs, tools, packed lunches and harvested vegies are transported using only the power of our scrawny legs and the sun!

Hyper-local

We want our veg to be eaten as close to the soil they grew in and the people who tended them as possible. That means we only sell in Yackandandah.

We also aim for all our inputs to come from Yack and its surrounds - no soil amendments or chemicals from the other side of the planet for us! We make our own compost from neighbourhood kitchen scraps, coffee grinds from local cafes, sawdust from a local furniture maker and crop residue from the garden, keeping these goodies out of the waste stream and our soil biology healthy, all in one fell swoop!

A bit messy, naturally

Nature usually has plans for us that run contrary to those we’ve laid out on our spreadsheets, and we’re okay with that. We don’t mind self-sown lettuces popping up in our beetroot patch, weeds in our pathways or the occasional mutant parsnip. And we love that our patch is a happy home to willy wagtails, native blue-banded bees and a family of wild quail.

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We grow, harvest and sell our vegies 50 weeks of the year. Our offerings look different, season by season, and we like to think that every tomato, every Brussels sprout, offers a little taste of the cultureshed in which Happy Underground exists.

We make our veg available via an online shop, accessible only to people on our mailing list. We ‘open’ the shop for our customers every Sunday evening, enabling them to choose from a list of seasonal goodies. (We don’t do set veg boxes, because we know not everyone likes kale or Brussels sprouts as much as we do!) Orders close on Thursday evening, ready for us to harvest, wash, pack and deliver on Friday. How’s that?!

*Given the seasonal slow-down that occurs with our vegies during winter, please be aware that if you request to join our mailing list in autumn or winter, we may not be able to add you until spring.

Meet the team

  • Chris McGorlick

    Chris is Happy Underground’s compost kid, and can usually be found with both hands stuck in a decomposing pile of goodness, testing its temperature.

    He came to the market gardening caper after years of being penned up behind a coffee machine while running his own local food cafe, Saint Monday.

    These days, his greatest joys are riding his cargo bike to the garden while swinging his legs to brass-laden funk and waving to passing traffic, trying to grow the perfect tomato and shooting the breeze with customers when he delivers their veg every Friday.

  • Lauren Salathiel

    Lauren’s greatest weakness is a self-sown plant, which probably makes her a terrible market gardener, in the eyes of a pro!

    She lives a double life, grinding mud into the knees of her trousers while scrambling around the garden looking for worms for half the week, and then trying to make her feminist rage more palatable to a conservative public as a women’s health service communications officer for the rest of the time.

    She has a vivid imagination and a utopian streak and secretly aspires to dig up all roads and turn them into edible garden-edged lanes for bikes, wheelchairs and pram-pushing pedestrians.