Niche Fruits is a husband and wife team. We are fruit growers in the Riverland of South Australia.
We are situated close to the stunning River Murray.
Our orchard (or block as we like to call it) is 17 acres, we grow apricots, peaches, pears, nectarines and plums. These are grown both for fresh market and for drying. We sell our dried fruit through our website, local visitor information centres, some local shops, a greengrocer and some local tourist destinations. We also attend the Mount Pleasant Farmers Market every fortnight, we have been attending here for approximately 5.5 years.
I look forward to sharing more of what we do and how we do it here at Niche Fruits. We find people love to know where their food comes from and the people who grow it for them.
Currently, we are pushing out nectarines and will replant this patch soon with more apricots, some peacharines (cross between peach and nectarine) and pluecot (cross between a plum and apricot)
We feel that the old-style “fruit salad block” works for us. We have a little bit of everything, this is great in that it spreads your crops out over the year, however, it increases your work season as well, think of pruning all of these trees and also thinning them if they are crops that need thinning done.
Stone fruit crops involve a lot of work and help at “season time” to manage your harvests.
Niche Fruits came about by having to find a new market for our dried fruit after being told soon after buying our 7acre property that we were no longer needed to supply the original company we were previously sending our fruit to. This was devastating as we needed to pay for the new property we had just purchased.
We chose the name Niche Fruits because it is a niche industry, not many people do it anymore.
And it is also a niche product, with a unique twist.
We love that we can grow, pack and sell our own product, it is affordable and our business began back in 1957 when Darrel’s mother and Grandmother brought the original 10 acres.