Photo courtesy "The Countryman"
They had little background in farming - Mark trained as a chef and Vickie is a nurse.
"I did a course in horticulture at Murdoch, but otherwise we have had to learn by trial and error and by reading literature, mainly from South Australia."
Looking for something to grow, they learnt about Australian native produce and bought some grafted quandong trees.
When these failed, they turned to growing desert limes, among a tropical fruit salad of unusual fruit trees, including the kaffir lime, whose fresh leaves are considered essential for Thai cookery.
Other fruit they tried to grow include babaco, mangosteens, ice cream fruit, bananas and mangoes.
"Babaco is absolutely fantastic," said Mark.
"It's like a green pawpaw and tastes magnificent."
Desert limes and a number of related wild citrus species, including finger, sunrise, golden and blood limes, have been developed by CSIRO as commercial varieties for the bush tucker industry.
Australian native limes have the highest level of vitamin C known in any citrus.
Mark and Vicki's business, Marvick Native Farms, is now one of only five growers in Australia.
The person from whom they bought their trees offered them a 25-year contract for their fruit, so they planted 1000 trees on some four hectares.
The wild limes are grafted on to lemon rootstock and take four years to fruit.
After six or seven years they should start to bear substantial crops.
Desert lime fruits are the size of a small olive.
They can be eaten whole, fresh, or frozen. Eaten out of the fridge, they taste strongly of citrus, but are not too sour.
Ruby, or blood limes, have larger fruit, about the size of a table tennis ball, while golden limes are a bit larger than cumquats.
"Harvesting is very labour intensive. Like most citrus, wild limes are shallow-rooted, so you can't shake the tree and they have dangerous thorns.
"We use welding gloves when harvesting them."
Desert limes thorns are about 2.5cm long and very sharp, while blood limes are shorter but still very sharp.
Wild limes are resistant to most pests.
"Citrus leaf miner attacked our golden limes.
"But they are easy to deal with. We gave them a spray of a light oil that suffocated the insects."
Native cicadas attack the immature shoots but leave the mature plants alone.
Mark irrigates the trees from two bores. Because of their shallow rooting habit he uses mini-sprinklers rather than drippers.
He usually gives the trees sheep manure and blood and bone meal, but this year, because of an unusual season, the trees were flowering and fruiting at the same time.
So he gave them NPK Blue native low phosphorus fertiliser for instant impact.
Normally, wild limes are dormant for much of winter. Wild lime trees grow to 3-5m, when in full production, but Mark and Vickie's are only about 2m high.
Their blood lime trees are about the size of a domestic fridge.
"They attract birds. Blue wrens clean up any scale insects, as do robin redbreasts and silvereyes. Nothing attacks the fruit."
Yields should reach up to 50kg/tree, but so far the most they have harvested is 20kg per tree. Four years after the trees were planted, they began to fruit.
At that point their supplier went bankrupt and they had no market.
First they tried to find a market for the fresh fruit.
Two local chefs expressed interest, but that was not enough to take the production of 1000 trees.
So Vickie decided to make wild lime marmalade.
They leased a commercial kitchen in Joondalup and started production.
They now market three marmalade varieties - wild desert lime, wild golden lime and wild ruby lime - made from different native citrus species - through a number of specialist stores in Perth.
Mark has used his culinary skills to develop a range of mouth-watering dishes using the marmalades, often as a glaze on roasted lamb or kangaroo steaks.
"We call it Australian native cuisine, not bush tucker," said Mark.
"Bush tucker has an image of witchetty grubs and that puts many people off."
Mark has begun promoting his fruit in Singapore, using his chef network.
"Chefs are as thick as thieves. The head chef at the Shangri La in Singapore worked at the Perth Sheraton shortly after I did," he said.
"I'm waiting to hear how he got on with our marmalade.
"Austrade has been very helpful in preparing us for the Asian market.
"They showed us how to redesign the labels, with a map of Australia and a label tie to explain its origins.
"Otherwise buyers would think it is just ordinary marmalade.
"We also chose smaller jars, as Asians like to buy small amounts to try."
They plan to use an olive press to squeeze the oil and juice from their wild limes.
They are also growing finger limes, bush tomatoes and native hibiscus.
"All we grow is edible."
Not only is it edible, it is adding new taste sensations to Australian native cuisine in WA.
My Block | Frank Smith
