By Stephanie Gardiner in Orange
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When Tiarna Smitheman couldn’t find fresh flowers to comfort a bereaved friend, she grew her own.
A sunny spot in her backyard brims with cosmos, sunflowers, dahlias, billy buttons and zinnias in spring and summer, a reminder of her friend’s late grandmother.
The women’s connection through flowers is the inspiration for her little roadside stall, The Blue Bee Market in Keith, a farming hub 230km south-east of Adelaide.
Ms Smitheman sells bunches of her home-grown blooms from the welcoming wall-papered stall, giving the community of 1400 an alternative to supermarket or servo bouquets.
In her first season, the stall sparked conversations around town, was a popular choice for Mother’s Day presents and captured the imaginations of tourists staying at the motel next door.
She gifted her friend a bouquet on the first anniversary of her grandmother’s passing.
“I finally had my own flowers to give her,” Ms Smitheman tells AAP.
With beginnings in a sweet gesture of friendship, The Blue Bee Market has become a way for Ms Smitheman to connect with her neighbourhood, teach local kids about nature and earn some money while raising two daughters.
“It’s the environment of living rurally, you make your own fun,” she says.
“It’s more of a wholesome life.”
Roadside stalls dot the landscape across Australia, offering fresh fruit and vegetables, nuts, eggs, honey, jam, plants, seeds, books, craft and even bags of horse and sheep manure for garden fertiliser.
These kinds of stalls, which usually operate on an honesty payment system, have a long history of offering fresh, homegrown produce directly to communities.
“Whatever direction you take a run in a motor car on Sundays you will find the roadsides lined with stalls and the stallholders are the farmers and their families," Queensland's Western Champion newspaper reported in 1931.
“Everything looks enticing and is good to taste, touch and smell.”
Nearly a century later, roadside stalls still play an important role in many rural households.
The Tasmanian Women in Agriculture group told a 2023 parliamentary inquiry examining country bank closures that stalls helped secure and diversify farming families’ earnings.
“Fewer income earning opportunities in regional and rural locations see households operate in the informal sector,” it wrote.
“Microbusinesses contribute to family income.”
Mother-of-three Louise Rothe’s stall, Googies and Greens, which stocks an abundance of homemade food, is so successful she didn’t have to return to a previous job in catering.
Ms Rothe set up the stall in Langhorne Creek, a picturesque wine-growing region 55km from Adelaide, as she recovered from post-natal depression.
“I needed something else to focus on, so it gave me a project and something to distract myself with,” she tells AAP as fresh loaves of bread bake in her oven while her young children nap.
“It was supposed to be just a little hobby selling veggies on the side of the road and it quickly expanded.”
Baked treats such as focaccia, brownies, pinwheel biscuits and banana bread are stocked in pastel hand-painted eskies alongside jars of homemade pesto, dried herbs and pickles.
Googies and Greens, which has more than 1000 followers on Instagram, allows Ms Rothe to work at her own pace while raising her children at home.
Social media posts that capture idyllic days in her kitchen and fertile vegetable patch have even helped lure visitors to town.
“It’s bringing people to our community that have also stopped around at the wineries and the brewery and all the other roadside stalls,” she says.
Two years travelling around Australia with her young family prompted Daneve Frankish to establish her stall in Captain Creek, in Queensland’s Gladstone region.
The family’s most memorable moments on the road included buying sourdough from a vintage fridge in Tasmania and swapping their kids’ books at street libraries in countless country towns.
“It was nice to be able to stop and support these little communities we were driving through,” Ms Frankish, a part-time teacher’s aide, says.
The Evenindee Homestead farm stall, which sits next to a street library, sells plants, soap, wire art, craft, bath salts and dried flowers.
Ms Frankish likes to think the stall, adorned with bright yellow bunting and sunflower motifs, helps keep the caravanning community connected through items made with homely care.
“There’s a lot more people trying to become more self-sufficient out here,” she says.
“Stalls are popping up a lot more in these sort of places because people are trying to support the smaller people, not the big companies.”
After spending years looking to escape the pressures of city life, engineer Katja Boese and her partner found a property at Lenswood, in the Adelaide Hills, teeming with native wildlife.
Among the 19 hectares was an established crop of proteas and leucadendron Ms Boese sells by the stem at her Blumenfeld stall, named for her German heritage.
Her customers are encouraged to buy single stems to create their own bunches.
“It’s a good alternative to bouquets because they are quite dear, if you consider how much time and effort goes into it,” Ms Boese says.
“If you just get the stems, it’s not a big effort for me and it makes people happy.”