The Craftsman’s Review ✦

Stories of Australian Craft & Kitchen

Advertorial · 3 days ago · By Kate Brennan

She spent 34 years watching what came off the fruit in a Tasmanian packing shed. Now she won’t let her granddaughter eat a berry straight from the punnet.

At 69, Leonie Coombe knows something most of us never think about: the berries in your fridge were never washed. The bowl she made for her granddaughter became the most-asked-about thing on her market stall. Now the market has closed for good, and around 300 bowls are left.

Leonie Coombe (69) in her studio in Cygnet, Tasmania, this October, with one of the last bowls from the spring firing.

The apple blossom is out along the road into Cygnet. The Saturday market closed for good a fortnight ago, when the organisers retired, and the folding table Leonie Coombe stood behind every weekend for two summers is leaning against the wall of her studio, an old corrugated-iron apple shed behind her house.

On the shelves above it sit the bowls, each with a small spout on one side. Leonie picks one up, drops in a handful of raspberries and turns the cold tap on into the spout.

The water doesn’t pour onto the berries. It runs in low along the side and starts to circle, and the whole handful turns slowly around the little cone in the middle. Bits of leaf drift out with the water. The raspberries come out whole.

“Everybody laughs the first time. Then they lean in to look at what’s left in the bottom of the bowl, and they stop laughing.”

She is 69. For 34 years, from 1987 until she retired in 2021, she worked the wash and grading lines at a cherry and apple packing shed outside Huonville, standing beside water that carried fruit from one end of the shed to the other.

“I can tell you what comes off fruit,” she says. “Leaves, stalks, dirt, sand. Little spiders, earwigs, gnats. People think fruit comes out of the paddock clean. It doesn’t. It comes out of a paddock.”

The bowls started as one bowl, made for one little girl. A year and a half later, strangers stop her in the supermarket to ask about them. And because the market has closed for good, this is the first time they’ve been for sale online.

Thirty-four years on a packing line, and the one thing she learned about water

At the packing shed, nobody ever sprayed the cherries hard, because a strong jet bruises soft fruit. The fruit rode in channels of moving water, called flumes. “Nothing touches the fruit,” she says. “The water does the work. It tumbles everything a little, and whatever was on it lets go and goes with the water.”

Cherries get that treatment. Berries mostly don’t. Strawberries, raspberries and blueberries are usually picked straight into the punnet they’re sold in, right in the field, and nobody washes them before the lid goes on. The first person to rinse them is you.

Field-packed and straight from the supermarket. Nobody washed these before the lid went on.

Leonie knew that. Her granddaughter didn’t.

Tilly is four. She is what her mum, Leonie’s daughter Kylie, calls “a berry monster”. The summer before last Leonie watched her climb onto a kitchen chair, pull a punnet of blueberries out of the fridge and eat half of it before anyone noticed. Straight from the punnet.

“I knew exactly where those berries had been. And I knew what they had never been through.”

Leonie took up pottery when she retired. First a Tuesday-night class at the community hall, then a second-hand wheel and a small kiln in the old apple shed behind her house. That week she threw a small, deep bowl. Then she shaped a little spout to stand upright on the side of the bowl, so the water would come in low and run along the wall, the way it came into the flumes at the packing shed.

Leonie throws every bowl and sets every spout herself. The height and angle of the spout is the part she won’t let anyone else touch.

It took her eleven tries. Too low, and the water shot straight out through the holes. On the twelfth bowl, the water caught the wall and started to turn.

Tilly named it the first afternoon. She stood on her stool at the sink, watched her blueberries go round and yelled for everyone to come and see “the berry-go-round”. She has washed every berry she has eaten since.

Leonie took two bowls to her market stall that Saturday, mostly as a joke. A woman bought both before nine. The next week there was a queue.

Word got around. Mainlanders on holiday took them home to Melbourne and Sydney and wrote asking for more, so Leonie started posting a few boxes a week from the shed. Until now there was no shop and no website, just that folding table in Cygnet and a pile of letters on her kitchen bench.

What makes Leonie’s bowl different

Most of us wash berries with a quick run under the tap, right in the plastic punnet. In one 2025 survey, about four in ten people who only rinse their produce said they rinse for ten seconds or less.

“The stream from your tap hits the top layer and goes straight out the bottom,” Leonie says. “The berries underneath barely get wet. Turn it up so it reaches them and it crushes your raspberries.”

Soaking isn’t much better. A vinegar bath can leave the fruit tasting of vinegar, and the berries sit in their own dirty water. Wash the whole punnet and put it back in the fridge wet, and it’s gone furry in two days.

Her bowl does what the flumes did. The water comes in low through the spout, follows the curved wall and starts circling on its own. The berries ride along in a cushion of water instead of being hit by it, turning so every side gets rinsed. Leaves and grit go out with the water through the holes around the cone, and the cone keeps the berries out of your plughole.

“I didn’t invent swirling water,” she says, before anyone can ask. “Every packing shed in this valley has used it for fifty years. All I did was put it in a bowl that fits under a kitchen tap.”

That is also why so many of the cheap copies online don’t work, she says. “If the spout sits too low or there are too many holes, the water runs straight out and never builds up. Then people say it doesn’t spin and chuck it in a drawer.” She sets every spout by hand and tests every finished bowl under the shed tap.

She is just as blunt about what it can’t do. The bowl is about 13 centimetres across and takes one good handful at a time. “Tip a whole punnet of strawberries in there and nothing is going to swirl,” she says. “Wash what you’re about to eat. The rest stays dry in the fridge and lasts longer.”

And she won’t make promises about chemicals. Strawberries regularly turn up near the top of the pesticide residue lists, and she knows plenty of her customers worry about that. “No rinse in the world gets out what’s inside a berry,” she says. “What I can get off is the dirt, the bugs and whatever all those hands left behind. That I can do, and it does it better than I ever did with a colander.”

Some of them came back to her stall just to say thank you

Leonie keeps a shoebox of notes people have left for her at the market. She pulls out a card from February and reads it out loud.

“That one usually hangs on the fridge in the shed,” Leonie says. “That’s who they’re for. Not for a shelf. For somebody’s sink.”

The bowls come in four glazes that Leonie dips by hand: Bruny Cream, a speckled white like the sand on Bruny Island; Channel Blue, with blue running down from the rim; Huon Sage, a soft green; and Deep Cobalt. Every glaze runs a little differently in the kiln, so no two bowls are alike.

The four glazes from this spring’s firing: Bruny Cream, Channel Blue, Huon Sage and Deep Cobalt. Each one is dipped by hand, so every bowl comes out a little different.

This is what’s left from the spring firing

The market finished up for good at the start of October, when the organisers retired and nobody took it on. Leonie had fired one last big kiln load in September for the spring crowds. Then the last three Saturdays were rained out.

So most afternoons now go to packing. The bowls come down off the shelves, get tested under the tap and wrapped in paper. A roster for the cherry season, starting in December, is pinned to the wall above the sink.

The last bowls from the spring firing, waiting to be packed. Every one is tested under the shed tap before it goes in a box.

What’s left comes to around 300 bowls. The kiln stays cold over summer: from December to February Leonie is back on the cherry line as a casual for the season. “They still ring me every year,” she says. There won’t be another firing this size before autumn.

“I could keep them in boxes until autumn,” Leonie says. “But they’d sit in a shed all summer while people eat berries out of the punnet. That makes no sense to me.”

So she set one flat price for what’s left: A$89 a bowl, down from the A$139 they sold for on her stall. “I’m not doing this to get rich,” she says. “I want them in kitchens before Christmas. Half the people at the market bought them as presents.”

Her daughter Kylie, Tilly’s mum, is the one who put them online. “Mum makes the bowls,” she says. “I just answer the emails.”

The water comes in low through the spout and circles on its own. The raspberries ride along in it and come out whole.

There’s no market to go back to, and no new firing before autumn. When the bowls from the spring firing are gone, that’s it.

What customers say

Where to get one of Leonie’s bowls

The bowls are only available through Leonie’s own shop, the one place to get the real bowls from this spring’s firing.

There’s no market any more, and what’s left from the spring firing is all there is

“I’ll fire again in autumn,” Leonie says. “But not like this. This was the big one.” When the last bowl from the September kiln load is gone, the shop closes until autumn.

Payment and shipping: The shop takes all major cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Every bowl is wrapped by hand and dispatched within 1 to 2 business days. Every order comes with Leonie’s 90-day money-back guarantee.

One of Leonie’s bowls at home, where she always wanted them to end up: by the sink in the morning, on the table by lunch.

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DISCLOSURE: The owner of this site has a material connection to the products shown on this page. Please review the full returns policy before ordering. Testimonials reflect individual experiences and results may vary. Rinsing with water helps remove surface dirt, debris and insects; it does not remove pesticide residues inside the fruit, bacteria, viruses or parasites. Images are for illustration; because each piece is finished and glazed by hand, the final product may vary slightly.

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