”It pretty much hit here and not really anywhere else.”

They had responded to an ad from a seed producer who was seeking interested people to grow tomatoes for seed crop.

“We were able to salvage about a third of the tomatoes for seed but by then we’d seen enough, tried enough, tasted enough, to think ‘what a waste’ – that we’re going to mulch all these tomatoes up for seed,” Mrs Reed said.

That was in 2010 and fast-forward to 2016 and Tasmanian Natural Garlic and Tomatoes produces about 4000 tonnes a year of tomatoes.

The Selbourne farm has become an authority on tomato and garlic crops for Northern Tasmania, something Mrs Reed, a teacher by trade, likes to encourage.

The first crop they produced for the fresh vegetable was sold at the Launceston Harvest Market, which was just getting up and running at the same time.

“There began the education process, of introducing people to something we really loved and wanted to share. That’s what really gives me a buzz,” she said.

Mrs Reed said education in agriculture was something that was personally important to her and has made it her mission to educate as many people as possible.

“There is something wonderful about garlic at every stage, right from the shoot, when you get green garlic, to the bulbs that form, every part of the plant is edible at different stages.”

Tasmanian Natural Garlic and Tomatoes uses a seasonable approach and tries to educate people around the benefits of using a product that is in season.

“Tomatoes have a season and that’s where they belong,” she said.

“Once you get outside the season you lose the flavour and quality, we are not into that.”

Mrs Reed said hydroponics would not be an option for their farm because they wanted to encourage and foster seasonable growth, to get the best tomato and garlic crops they could.

“A lot of farmers now are trying to think that way - the quality has become far more important and that is a really nice thing,” she said.

“We often think, why didn’t we do this 20 years ago, but the answer is we couldn’t have. not only were we in a different place then but the community was in a different space.

“The Harvest Market couldn’t have happened 20 years ago - it wasn’t the time but now is the time for it.”

It is no secret that rural life can be tough and isolating and Mrs Reed experienced the full gamut of that life when her daughter was involved in a  horse riding accident.

Mrs Reed describes the long period of hospital stays in Victoria as her daughter recovered in intensive care as being “split down the middle.”

“While you are charging ahead with the survival stuff, Neville had to come back to the farm here, life has to go on, you can’t stop to think,” she said.

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“We were told to go home, that she would be fine, but you can’t just ignore the whole thing.”

The experience of her daughter’s accident and subsequent recovery was a light-bulb moment for the Reeds, who finally realised the full extent of rural isolation.

“I had no idea what it was like. The thing about something like that is you have no idea what people are going through. What might be someone’s issues, until you have walked in their shoes.”

While the medical staff did their best job looking after her daughter, Mrs Reed she experienced time and time again how much they didn’t understand about farmers or people who lived on the land.

Being ripped away from their home was devastating for the whole family and caused her daughter’s recovery to stall until Mrs Reed took matters into her own hands.

She brought her daughter’s horses to the hospital to bring a small part of the land to the city.

That experience, coupled with Mrs Reeds’ passion for education, resulted in charity organisation Rural Help @ Hand – an organisation that helps to raise awareness in the medical sector about the specific issues that affect farmers as patients.

“It is really personally important to me, I have felt that isolation,” she said.

“I have worked professionally in the city, and not even a big city, but as a farmer have felt totally isolated in my work environment because the language is so different, the needs are so different.”

Rural Help @ Hand is a volunteer organisation that raises awareness of the particular issues that face farmers who become patients in city hospitals.

The organisation was a guest speaker at the recent rural medical week held at the Rural Clinical School on the North-West.

Mrs Reed said it was important medical professionals addressed the lack of understanding and tried to understand their rural patients.

“These people are independent, quite resilient, risk takers, they are solution finders.  You might be doing a great job medically, it’s only part of the story. If you say go home and put your feet up, it ain’t going to happen,” she said.

Rural Help @ Hand also engages farmer groups, to educate them about their behaviour as patients. Mrs Reed said it was all about “bridging the gap” between farmers and medical professionals.

“We want to try and help medical professionals find a way for them [the farmers] to go home and do it safely and reduce the risk what they are dealing with,” she said.

Mrs Reed is the president of Tasmanian Women in Agriculture (TWiA) and the winner of the Tasmanian Women in Agriculture award in 2014.

Her study tour was called “Small Farm, Big Ideas, and she travelled to Canada and the US to other small farms to see what they were doing that could translate to Tasmanian small farms.

She said it was about finding ideas that could work on her own property and others and held five workshops across the state.