Sight Unseen: A Selwyn Adventure in Olives
10 March 2026
10 March 2026
It started with the glow of a laptop screen at 2am and a Google search for rural properties.
Jayne Collier, an Auckland based car dealer by day and insomniac Googler by night, stumbled across a listing: five acres of olive trees in West Melton, with a deadline sale in two days. She showed her husband Wayne the listing over breakfast. Friends inspected the property on their behalf, and by Tuesday, they owned it without ever setting foot on the land.
Welcome to Sight Unseen, a West Melton olive grove where Jayne and Wayne now produce premium extra virgin olive oil. What began as a spontaneous decision has become a hands-on learning journey and a new chapter rooted in Waikirikiri Selwyn soil.
“We literally bought the property without ever visiting it,” Jayne laughs. “We owned an olive grove before we really understood what that meant.”
Neither Jayne nor Wayne had a horticulture background, but over the past few years they’ve turned their hobby grove into a small working olive oil operation. The learning curve has been steep, from horticulture courses and industry guidance to even joining a family olive harvest in Greece last year.
“That experience gave us confidence we were doing the right things,” says Jayne.
Along the way, they discovered they weren’t the only ones figuring out olives in Canterbury. Many lifestyle blocks have a handful of trees – too few for a commercial pressing run and too many to just leave to the birds! So Jayne and Wayne organised a community pressing day, allowing small growers to combine their harvests and finally bottle oil from their own fruit.
“It was incredibly rewarding,” Jayne says. “Some people had never been able to press their olives before.”
Their grove has quickly become a gathering point for Canterbury’s small olive-growing community, with Jayne happily sharing pruning tips and advice with neighbours.
“People call me the local olive expert,” she laughs. “I’ve only been doing this a couple of years, but you learn something and want to share it.”
The Hidden Pantry, the name of their on-farm shop in West Melton, is now open and welcoming visitors. Inside you’ll find shelf-stable local products including honey, hazelnuts, saffron and olive oil, creating a small but proudly local destination.
With around 300 olive trees, production will remain small. For Jayne and Wayne, success isn’t about scaling up, it’s about building something sustainable while supporting other local Selwyn producers.
“There’s real pride in this district,” Jayne says. “People genuinely want to support Selwyn businesses.”
What began as a late-night online purchase has grown into something much bigger: a thriving little olive grove, a new community connection, and a reminder that sometimes the best adventures really do start sight unseen.
