Thoughts on turning five!

 The Dill Tickle celebrates our fifth birthday this week! I am equal parts blown away and exhausted by this milestone! But it inspired me to write a few thoughts on the colourful chaos that is five years of creating pickles and jams.

My love of pickles and condiments began early! It was not unusual for me to wander the garden after school with a jar of pickled onions and a skewer, following mum as she plucked weeds and I popped onions into my mouth as we went. On school excursions, I was always the happy recipient of the discarded pickles from everyone else’s Maccas burgers. When I travelled Europe on a gap year with girlfriends, we were never without a jar of pickles to snack on with cheese.

My mum was a great cook and I remember her making chutney and marmalade. She also always encouraged my cooking enthusiasm and by the time I had finished university, I was very much a die-hard foodie. Any excuse to entertain and cook up a feast for friends, I would take it. When I was working in publishing I read the book (later made into a fab movie) “Julie and Julia” and decided that I too would cook every recipe in a cookbook and write a blog about it. It was a fun, costly, pudgy and delicious year. My love of food and cooking was truly cemented.

During that year of cooking and blogging, I had a weekend away and was given a bag of plums. I came home and found a recipe for Plum Jam (in the Commonsense Cookery Book) and had such unexpected success with the small batch, that my confidence was high! Next was chutney (using Mum’s old recipe), followed by marmalade, pickled cucumbers and strawberry jam. I was hooked!

When I left Sydney and moved to Orange, the produce at my fingertips was too good to be true and my pickle and jam making really took off. My go-to gift to take to any dinner or house party was always a jar of something homemade and I started to get a lot of compliments and questions about why I didn’t try to make something of my hobby. I have always been a big old scaredy cat when it comes to taking risks, so I shrugged it off.

Then I met Dave, got married, moved to the farm at Mendooran, started a family and found myself looking for something to do from home. Something I enjoyed. Something I could do at my own pace, in my own home with two small children. Something that might help us get through a crippling drought. A chance gathering under a giant jacaranda tree with a group of talented creatives was the final push I needed, so I came home and rang my friend Em and asked her to design me a logo. The name was an easy choice – I had always called dill pickles, Dill Tickles as a kid…

Six months later and six months pregnant with my second child, I sent some sample jars to Dan at Millthorpe Providore asking if he would be interested in stocking my new business and away it went. It was August 2019. Three months later my fledgling business was featured on the feed of that other fledgling 2019 phenomenon… Buy From The Bush. 

What Grace and her team did for bush businesses is truly incredible. And whilst I was not geared up for the epic tsunami of interest in my little business, it certainly inspired me to keep going and really have a crack. I quadrupled my production in the months leading up to my daughter’s birth (yikes!) and sent out corporate orders from one end of the state to the other. I had new stockists, new followers and new products.

Within a year, I had increased my product range from three to 11. I had over a dozen wholesalers across NSW and was working seven days a week, for 10 months of the year. And yet it still just felt like this little thing that I was doing from home, while the kids slept!

To be completely honest, apart from the fact that the kids no longer have those day sleeps (and I no longer hand write the labels…), it still kind of feels the same!

The game changer of course was finally launching my website last year. Looking back, I don’t really know why I was so reluctant to do it for so long, because it has been the best thing I’ve done for The Dill Tickle. But it’s all about timing and the timing just had to be right I guess. And there’s that risk averse thing too…!

So at five years in, the numbers look like this…
11 seasonal products.
Over 13,000 jars made.
Almost 1000 batches.
Over 3000 labels written.
Three new products tested and disappointingly rejected.
327 Instagram posts, 17 newsletters and one magazine feature.
10 current stockists (including two of the originals!)
One beautiful website.
Several burns. Two bouts of bursitis.
One new kitchen.
And many many new grey hairs! 

I am really proud of this milestone, as I feel like getting to five years is no mean feat! I’ve watched quite a few businesses that kicked off around the same time as TDT come to a close in the past year for various reasons and I totally get it! It’s a tough gig running a small business in this mad world we live in. Every week is a fresh slog to a never-ending finish line and some days the only thing that I feel keeps me going is the fact that I don’t really know where else I’d get my pickles from if there were no TDT! Ha!! 

I often get asked (and ask myself) what the plan is for The Dill Tickle (my pickles in a Maccas burger? my own shop? the DJs food hall? my jams on a Qantas plane? an overseas stockist?) and I honestly don’t know! While ever I still enjoy it - and I really really do! - I will keep making my pickles and jams. I still get an absolute thrill when I get an order from someone new (how on earth did they find out about me?). My heart soars when someone I know, but didn’t know bought my products, tells me that they love them. Meeting and chatting with customers at market days if my favourite. I love knowing that something I’ve created is making people happy.

But it is hard. The nights are late. The sacrifices are big. I often wonder whether my children will resent The Dill Tickle for all the time it takes me away from them. But I can only hope that it might be tempered with pride for seeing how hard I work and how much I love what I do.

Financially, the food industry is not a generous one! Any chef, caterer, cafe/restaurant owner, producer or farmer knows this. So, there’s always that on my mind too…

But for now, all I can picture in my future is more mountains of fresh produce waiting to be sliced, boxes of jars ready to be washed and sterilised, crates of vinegar, buckets of sugar and piles of labels all tucked in various corners of the house. My children’s wardrobes will continue to be taken up with the rows of jars that we stockpile and I will continue to sharpen my knives, rejoice in my new kitchen and pickle and jam to my heart’s content.

Thank you, dear Ticklers, for your wonderful, loyal and loving support. I am grateful for it all.

Happy 5th Birthday to The Dill Tickle!