From Floods to Freedom: How Rhiannon Phillips Found Her Niche in the Blue Mountains

Rhiannon Phillips founder of Mountains Gourmet sourounded by a crop of sunflowers

On a sloping block overlooking the folds of the Blue Mountains, evening light catches on the glossy green of bok choy and silverbeet. The rows of produce run across the slope, each one an act of defiance against a food system that has totally forgotten its roots. Here, among the bird calls and hum of bees, you’ll find Rhiannon Phillips, the heart and hands behind Mountains Gourmet.

Rhiannon’s journey to this hillside garden wasn’t a straight line. In fact, it wound its way through cattle paddocks, floods, and a pandemic before she finally found her footing in the rocky blue mountains sandstone soils.

“I studied animal and veterinary bioscience,” she laughs. “I thought I’d be working with cattle and sheep forever.” But when she entered the industry, she saw cracks in the system, a reliance on chemicals, a detachment from land and health. “It just didn’t feel right. I realised I wanted to grow something that nourished people, not just fed them.”

Rhiannon Phillips founder of Mountains Gourmet

So she did what few twenty-somethings would dare: she bought an old bus, turned it into a tiny home, and hit the road. “I worked on farms up and down the East Coast, all the way to Alice Springs,” she says. “I learned so much, but I also learned that not everyone wanted to hear advice from a young woman. Especially a small one,” she jests.

It wasn’t until COVID struck that she found her opportunity. Offered the role of assistant manager at Hebron Farm in the Hawkesbury, NSW, Rhiannon stepped into the chaos of running a mixed farm: cattle, goats, chickens, orchard, and market garden. Within months, her mentor left, and Rhiannon was handed the reins.

“I was twenty-three and completely out of my depth,” she admits. “But it was incredible. The whole place ended up being run by women. It was tough, muddy, exhausting but it showed me what I was capable of.”

Then came the floods.
“The wettest years of my life,” she says, shaking her head. “We lost the market garden three times. I remember standing in knee-deep water thinking, I can’t do this anymore.”

That’s when the Blue Mountains west of Sydney Australia, called her home.

“I grew up here,” she says, looking out over the valley. “And I realised what I wanted something stable, sustainable, and close to community.”

The block she found was small but perfect: north-facing, protected from floods, with a native gully below that carries the sound of frogs at night. Here, she built Mountains Gourmet; a one-woman market garden feeding families, local cafés, and even the kitchens of tech giant Canva in Sydney.

But what strikes you most isn’t her ambition, it’s her sense of purpose. “I wanted to grow food that had meaning. Food that people could see growing, touch, and understand.”

Rhiannon runs her garden using regenerative, no-dig principles, feeding the soil with compost and organic matter, avoiding disturbing the delicate web of life beneath, which enables her vegetables to feed directly from the nutrence within the soils . Her veggie boxes are seasonal, her garden is zero waste, and her business model is refreshingly human.

As we sit in the sunshine recording ‘The Gardener’s Lodge Podcast’ we are constantly interrupted by locals picking up their weekly food boxes or buying seedlings rhiannon has raised. Others dropping of loads of cardboard to smother weeds. It is easy to see this whole enterprise isn’t about profits, it’s about community, education and healthy soil.

“I always say the plants are just the byproduct,” she smiles. “The real work is caring for the soil.”

And perhaps that’s true of Rhiannon herself, a farmer who’s cultivated her own resilience from the ground up. From the floods of the Hawkesbury to the slopes of the Blue Mountains, her story is of growth, grit, and grounded freedom.

“Sometimes,” she says, brushing dirt from her hands, “you don’t have to change the whole world. You just start with one small patch of it.”

Listen to our full chat with Rhiannon on The Gardener’s Lodge Podcast