Jill and Allan Noble with the vegetables they grow and are famous for in Katikati at their business, The Onion and Vegie Place.
Jill and Allan Noble with the vegetables they grow and are famous for in Katikati at their business, The Onion and Vegie Place.
Back in the day, young women started arriving into Katikati to start their teaching careers at the local primary school.
Jill Collett was one of them and Allan Noble from Kauri Point noticed the newbie straight away.
“Each year, two new teachers would turn up into town,” Allan says. “We knew too much about the local girls, we went to school with them. So there was always potential.”
Jill says she was ‘’teacher number seven’' at Katikati Primary School.
The two meet at St Paul’s Presbyterian Church and were soon talked into a double date with friends.
“The first time Allan came to my house, he and my father talked tractors all night. He was very impressed because Allan had manners,” Jill says.
Three years later they married.
The two - who own Katikati’s famous The Onion Vegie Place - celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary today. They married on February 2, 1963, at St Enoch’s Presbyterian Church in Tauranga.
Jill and Allan’s special day also fell on Katikati’s special day of the popular A&P Show. They got some stick from guests for unwittingly selecting this day.
“Our wedding guests didn’t let us forget it,” Jill says. But the 200 guests were happy to attend and to get out of town for the day.
“Most of them were farmers so everyone had to get home to milk so it was all over by half past two,” she says.
Allan and Jill Noble were wed in Tauranga on the same day as Katikati's A&P show day on February 2, 1963.
Not one, not two, but four ministers helped officiate the wedding. Two were a surprise.
“There was the minister who married my parents, our Katikati minister and the St Enoch’s minister was invited along. And then, we think, the fourth one was from Bible class.”
The night of the wedding the family went back to Jill’s father’s place but the local council had dug a trench for drainage right outside the house. They had to “walk the plank” to get across.
Twenty five years later, on their anniversary, the same thing happened.
Jill and Allan Noble in front of the same house on the property they've lived and worked in for 60 years.
1963 was a big year for the couple.
They married and bought the farm just outside of Katikati where they’ve lived ever since. They also got a new car.
At the time it was a dairy farm, but Allan wanted to be a market gardener so he started working the land straight away.
The first two crops he grew were onions and pumpkins. Jill stayed on as a teacher, but worked on the farm fulltime when their son Leigh was born.
After 18 months of hard graft, they started selling second-grade produce from their gate. They started off with just four customers per day.
Further crops included greens such as broccoli, cabbages and all leafy vegetables. They grew strawberries for eight years. Later, sales moved to the big shed.
The Onion and Vegie Shop is probably best known for the large, fresh broccoli heads they grow.
They now run an online delivery service, Growlink, which was developed by their son Leigh. The service supplied many homes from Tauranga to Whangamatā with fresh produce throughout the Covid-19 lockdowns.
