Fanling's "Heart & Effort" Organic Farm launches experiences including farm feasts and pizza workshops

 

 

Unable to travel abroad under the pandemic, many people have been thinking of heading out into nature to recover the joy of travelling. Earlier I took an organic farm tour, enjoying the greenery and tasting fresh food to the full, with a feeling much like being in Western Australia. What's even better is that right now you can also come to the hotel and enjoy a Western Australia-style staycation, taking photos against the local scenery and savouring Western Australian delicacies, making the most of a marvellous "Aussie" holiday.

Organic estate Fresh ingredients

Forced to stay in Hong Kong under the pandemic, everyone is now happy to discover local travel fun, and farm tours are one of the popular activities. Believe it or not, Hong Kong actually has more than one hundred local farms, and some not only use organic farming but are also very large in scale, such as the "Heart & Effort" organic farm in Fanling, which covers a full 250,000 sq ft, with 9,450 sq ft of certified organic farmland. It truly lives up to its name as a local farm run with care.

 

As soon as we entered the farm gate, we immediately felt a strong sense of nature. The grounds were filled with all kinds of fresh plants, and a huge Italian brick oven also caught our eye. It turns out that the "Heart & Effort" farm not only offers fruit and vegetable picking, farm guided tours, and seasonal organic farming and harvesting activities, but can also arrange diverse experiences such as farm feasts and pizza workshops. That colourful Italian brick oven was built specially for preparing all these wonderful dishes.

 

The first activity of this trip was a homemade pizza contest using the oven. Besides preparing healthy long-fermented dough, the farm also provided its own tomato sauce, spicy sausage and farm bell peppers for us to get creative with. Baked over lychee wood fire in the oven, the finished pizzas were indeed full of aroma. But an even richer feast was yet to come. The farm chef specially grilled all kinds of food for us over the oven fire, and whether it was grilled steak, wagyu or prawns, each was extremely delicious. Paired with ingredients such as the farm's in-season figs and the Western Australian Margaret River wine we brought ourselves, the relaxed feeling of travelling in Western Australia instantly came flooding back!

 

After eating and drinking our fill, it was time to tour the estate with the farm manager, and only then did we truly appreciate its scale. Every greenhouse and field was planted with different varieties of fruits and vegetables, from figs, grapes and Okinawan bitter melon to pineapples, too many to count, all ingredients supplied to local hotels and fine restaurants - it really was an eye-opener! Such appealing fruits and vegetables are of course not only for enjoying on site; we bought some right there to take the local fresh flavours home!