Tina Berg with some of her dahlias and the flower cart outside her home in Prell Street, Goulburn. Photo: John Thistleton.
A little more than a stone’s throw from Goulburn Base Hospital, a flower cart has been selling out of its freshly stocked vases full of dahlias each morning.
But its proximity to a regular stream of people visiting family members in hospital has little to do with the white and pink cart’s origins. It first appeared in late summer last year and returned at the same time this year.
A professional photographer with a passion for growing dahlias, Tina Berg began her venture more or less as a hobby.
When her husband Michael – a self-employed welder and steel fabrication whiz – asked Tina a couple of years ago what she wanted for her birthday, she said a flower cart.
“I said my dahlia addiction is growing and I’m running out of vases to have them inside. I’m going to have too many; I’m going to sell them,” Tina said.
Gathering up scrap materials including leftover pallets and two wheels off a secondhand bike Tina had bought for $10, Michael set out to recreate a cart similar to ones his wife had found online on Pinterest.
Wheeled out in front of their Prell Street home, and with the help of a social media post after she had a burst of resplendent dahlias, Tina’s new venture was up and running. Many of her friends were among the first customers, leaving their money in an honesty box built into the eye-catching cart.
“The neighbours loved me because they got all the leftovers,” she said. “I will only ever cut fresh every day, and depending on how they are looking I will keep them for a maximum of two days, and then they get gifted.”
Often neighbours would come home to find a vase and joyful flowers on their letter boxes. “They would love me and repay me with jam, tomatoes, or whatever,” she said.
To begin the selling season in February this year, she switched to the Goulburn Community Noticeboard site on social media.
“I literally sold out every day last week, and the season for me has only just kicked off; I can’t keep up,” she said. “I’m selling them cheaply – I am not in it to make money. It covers costs for my tubers and soil.’’
Once cut and displayed the dahlias have a shelf life of about a week.
A beautifully formed dahlia awaits a new admirer from within Tina Berg’s flower cart in Goulburn. Photo: Tina Berg.
Tina has been surprised at people contacting her to book flowers, either for a baby shower, or other occasions, such as visiting loved one’s gravesites.
Her friends’ children buy them for their teachers at school, and friends of those friends return and buy flowers for their mothers.
“I have been out the front and little kids in their uniforms like looking at them – they are fascinated by them. It’s nice,” she said. Hospital visitors, as it happens, are snapping some up too.
Regularly emptying the cart’s in-built honesty box has reassured her of people’s trustworthiness and goodwill. Should anyone spoil that record, a closed-circuit TV camera, and protective Rottweiler would likely bring them back to reality.
Tina’s love affair with dahlias began after the Sydney Royal Easter and Goulburn shows from which she came away enchanted with their gorgeous colours and perfectly symmetrical shape.
“I always loved them and I just thought I could never grow them,” she said.
But her first attempts with three or four varieties happily demonstrated that far from being difficult, they were easy to grow. Lifting them at season’s end revealed their tubers had multiplied like tulip bulbs. One tuber was suddenly six or seven tubers.
Well-drained soil is needed. Given prolonged rainfall, or in poorly drained soil they will rot.
She shared some simple tips with another woman who had asked for help. She pointed out a sunny, well-drained position and how and when to stake them and heard back during the subsequent flowering season from the grateful woman that the dahlias were flourishing.
The season will come to an end in April, and the frost will likely burn any stragglers still in the ground.
No stranger to creating side hustles in addition to her seasonal real estate photography, Tina says she always likes to be doing something.
Besides, “Gardening and giving flowers to people makes me happy,” she said.
