About Us

Urban Heirlooms is devoted to the harder-to-find wonderfully-tasting foods for you to grow yourselves.

‘Us’ is mostly me, Kristi Ellinopoullos, though Urban Heirlooms is a business under our company Optimate Group Pty Ltd.
I’m the mad plant-nut pursuing a passion, and do all the plant-stuff and running of this site.
Hubby does all the equally important but behind-the-scenes man-stuff like building garden beds and whatever else needs to be made or fixed!

We also run two other plant-related businesses:

• Garden Clippings, again mostly my excuse to pursue a later-in-life-developed passion for ornamental plants.
  Garden Clippings and Urban Heirlooms understandably have some overlaps, and common products and blog posts will appear on both websites
• The Jujube Tree Nursery. Another excuse to pursue a passion as well as a deep interest in botany!
  There, I write about the trees on this blog, as well as explore topics on horticulture, soil, microbiology and agricultural chemistry. That site is also the home of my passion-project online book From Soil to Fruit — this is where I really drill down into far more detailed science than a blog can cover

Short Bio
BSc(Hons), U.Syd. - double major in biochemistry and microbiology, with honours in microbiology
PhD, U.Syd - soil microbiology
Stumbled into IT and publishing of all things.
Discovered jujube trees and realised that perhaps I should have been an agronomist…
So I combined all the above passions and interests into plant-related websites and blogs, on which I write about plants, gardening, botany, soil chemistry, soil microbiology and biochemistry!