Decorative photo It started with the glow of a laptop screen at 2am and a Google search for rural properties.

Jayne Collier, a Mission Bay-based car dealer by day and insomniac Googler by night, came across the listing: five acres of olive trees in West Melton listed with a deadline sale in two days.

Jayne showed her husband Wayne the listing over breakfast. By Monday, they'd enlisted friends to inspect the property. By Tuesday, they owned it—without ever setting foot on the land themselves.

Welcome to Sight Unseen, five acres of olive trees in West Melton where Jayne and Wayne produce premium extra virgin olive oil. For the adventurous pair, it’s more than a business—it’s a complete change of pace, a hands-on education, and a new chapter rooted in Selwyn soil.

"We literally sold our place in Mission Bay and bought this property without ever having visited it," Jayne says. "We owned an olive grove before we really understood what that meant."

What did it mean? A steep learning curve for two people with “zero horticulture background”. Jayne had been a car dealer in Auckland; Wayne works in corporate. Neither had farmed anything more ambitious than a suburban garden. But over the past two and a half years, they've transformed a hobby grove into a real McCoy working olive oil operation—and accidentally become a community hub for Canterbury's emerging olive growers.

The transformation started with questions. Lots of them. "If I want to know something and I drive past someone's place, I'll just knock on their door and ask," Jayne says.

"Jayne's the extrovert,” says Wayne. “I just prefer to sit and watch my football or get into the garden, whereas Jayne's more than happy to go and knock on someone's door."

“I can’t help it!” Jayne says. "That's the salesperson in me."

The learning process has been intense but methodical, including local horticulture training, technical guidance from industry associations, and, last November, time working a family olive harvest in Greece.

Working alongside growers whose families had been producing olive oil for generations provided crucial validation of Sight Unseen’s approach.

"The biggest thing I learned was that we're doing the right thing," Jayne says of the Greek experience. "It has given us the confidence to keep going."

That confidence has translated into a willingness to experiment in the face of challenge: when they discovered how expensive courier costs were for shipping bottles, they decided to open their own shop. When the main olive presser in Hokitika retired during a bumper harvest year, they found themselves processing five tonnes of other people's olives alongside their own.

"We didn't know how any of this worked in the beginning," says Jayne. "We bought a press because we didn't realise that, typically, you just pay other people to press your olives! Now we've become the local community press."

That pressing work revealed just how many small producers were struggling with the same challenges. Canterbury has dozens of lifestyle blocks with 20 or 30 olive trees—enough for a family's annual oil supply, but not the 150 kilos needed to make a press run viable.

So this year, Jayne and Wayne organised a community pressing day. A dozen small growers brought their harvests, weighed their contributions, and collectively filled the press. Weeks later, after the oil had settled and been racked, they collected their bottles.

"There were a lot of people who'd never pressed their fruit before," she says. "It has been really satisfying to help them actually use what they've grown."

In Canterbury's small olive-growing community, word travels fast about who knows how to rescue an overgrown tree. Jayne has helped neighbours prune their trees, sharing techniques she learned from the Greek harvest and her own trial and error.

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"They call me the local olive expert and I've only been doing this for two years," she says. "But you learn something and you just want to share it with other people who are interested."

Selwyn District Council has been an important part of that support network. When Jayne and Wayne wanted to open an on-farm shop, Council confirmed they wouldn't need consent for selling their own products.

When they needed a separate street address for the shop—they didn't want their home address on every product label—Council arranged a rapid number within days.

Sarah Cobbold from Economic Development has connected them with other local producers and introduced them to Selwyn Connect, a business networking group that's helped them think through their retail strategy.

"It's funny because everybody complains about councils," Wayne observes. "But they've been great. They’ve supported us every time we’ve reached out.

"Council has been really supportive," Jayne says. "Every time we've needed something, they've been there to help us figure it out."

That shop—The Hidden Pantry—is their next big project. Opening soon on their West Melton property, it's designed as a shared retail space for shelf-stable local products: honey, hazelnuts, saffron and beyond.

"We're trying to make it a really inclusive local space for producers," Jayne says. The long term plan is to have seasonal markets and tasting events, creating a destination for visitors and residents alike, wanting to take home something distinctly local.

Meanwhile, they continue experimenting with their own product range. Jayne's making soap from oil that's left over from the racking process. They're planning to produce vinegar—Wayne's a chemical engineer, so fermentation science is familiar territory. And they're working on dirty martini brine, after a friend complained there's never enough brine in a jar of olives to make proper cocktails.

The olives themselves are producing well in the district’s distinctive climate. The rocky Rolleston soil provides excellent drainage; the shorter daylight hours mean fruit stays greener and develops higher polyphenol levels. Sight Unseen's extra virgin olive oil—made primarily from Frantoio and Leccino varietals—has a pronounced peppery finish that comes from those polyphenols.

They're in no hurry to scale. With 300 trees—about 200 currently producing—their maximum output will probably top out at around 400 litres annually.

"We're not where we want to be yet," Wayne admits. "We're maybe halfway there, but it isn't really about volume; it's about creating something sustainable.”

“And supporting other small producers along the way,” says Jayne. "There's a real pride in this district. Everyone is very committed to supporting Selwyn businesses."

Coming from Auckland's sprawling anonymity to West Melton’s tight-knit community felt like a natural fit, despite the dramatic lifestyle change. Since moving, Wayne has discovered that his great-grandparents had been blacksmiths in nearby Fairlie—their old homestead is now a museum—so the move turned out to be a homecoming neither of them expected.

For now, the work continues: olive trees to prune, community pressing days to organise, neighbours needing and offering support and guidance through harvest season.

Increasingly, success looks less like a business plan and more like a thriving community culture of growers and producers—one where everyone knows who to call when harvest season arrives.

Last modified: 21 Nov 2025 2:06pm