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Val Peachey has been gardening all her adult life. In fact, she was learning by osmosis long before then, as her parents kept a beautiful garden filled with roses, annuals and vegetables at her childhood home at Kingaroy in southern Queensland.

She continued the tradition when, as a newlywed, she and her late school-teacher husband, Ron, went to Windorah in the state’s far west, where they attempted their first garden. “We had no mains power and no reticulated water,” Val recalls. “Our water came