Fay Gock (25 March 1933 – 21 December 2018) was a New Zealand horticulturalist. With her husband

Joe Gock Joe (Moo Lock) Gock Queen's Service Medal, QSM (1928 – ) is a New Zealand Horticulture, horticulturalist. With his wife Fay Gock, Fay Wong Gock, he made numerous innovations in the growing and selling of fruit and vegetables. Their contributions r ...

, she made numerous innovations in the growing and selling of fruit and vegetables, for which they jointly won the

Bledisloe Cup The Bledisloe Cup is an annual rugby union competition originally staged between the national teams of Australia's Wallabies and New Zealand's All Blacks that has been contested since the 1930s. The frequency that the competition is held has va ...

in 2013. They are credited with the survival of the indigenous sweet potato known as

kūmara The sweet potato or sweetpotato (''Ipomoea batatas'') is a dicotyledonous plant that belongs to the bindweed or morning glory family, Convolvulaceae. Its large, starchy, sweet-tasting tuberous roots are used as a root vegetable. The young shoot ...

, integral to

Maori cuisine New Zealand cuisine is largely driven by local ingredients and seasonal variations. An island nation with a primarily agricultural economy, New Zealand yields produce from land and sea. Similar to the cuisine of Australia, the cuisine of New Z ...

Early life

Gock was born Wong Way Gin (黄蕙娟) in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

on 25 March 1933. In 1941, she and her mother left the county of Sunwui as refugees from the Japanese occupation, and came to New Zealand. Her family ran a fruit shop on

Karangahape Road Karangahape Road (commonly known as K' Road) is one of the main streets in the central business district (CBD) of Auckland, New Zealand. The massive expansion of motorways through the nearby inner city area – and subsequent flight of resident ...

Auckland Auckland (pronounced ) ( mi, Tāmaki Makaurau) is a large metropolitan city in the North Island of New Zealand. The List of New Zealand urban areas by population, most populous urban area in the country and the List of cities in Oceania by po ...

. During the 1947

polio Poliomyelitis, commonly shortened to polio, is an infectious disease caused by the poliovirus. Approximately 70% of cases are asymptomatic; mild symptoms which can occur include sore throat and fever; in a proportion of cases more severe s ...

epidemic which closed

North Island The North Island, also officially named Te Ika-a-Māui, is one of the two main islands of New Zealand, separated from the larger but much less populous South Island by the Cook Strait. The island's area is , making it the world's 14th-largest ...

schools for four months, she went to work in her father's shop. There, she put up the first signs in their shop, and began the innovation of washing carrots to improve their sales, which soon caught on in nearby shops.

Marriage and business

Fay Wong met Joe Gock, another young

Chinese New Zealander Chinese New Zealanders ( mi, Tāngata Hainamana o Aotearoa; ) or Sino-New Zealanders are New Zealanders of Chinese ancestry. The largest subset of Asian New Zealanders, many of the Chinese immigrants came from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, ...

, when he delivered a load of produce to her father's shop, and they married in 1956. The started their own growing business, although at the time, legal restrictions on Chinese immigrants meant they couldn't own land or build a house. Instead they lived in a barn as they grew their business to become the largest market garden in Mangere. Together with her husband, Gock continued to innovate in their business, beginning commercial washing of vegetables, using a tumbler machine. They were among the first in Auckland to grow

Brussels sprouts The Brussels sprout is a member of the Gemmifera cultivar group of cabbages (''Brassica oleracea''), grown for its edible buds. The leaf vegetables are typically 1.5–4.0 cm (0.6–1.6 in) in diameter and resemble miniature cabbages ...

, as well as growing peas, cauliflowers, carrots, parsnips and potatoes. They produced seedless watermelon, and were the first in the world to develop individual fruit stickers to prevent deliverers mixing up seedless watermelons with seeded ones. They began growing

after they were given some spare plants by a neighbour. At the time black rot (''

Ceratocystis fimbriata ''Ceratocystis fimbriata'' is a fungus and a plant pathogen, attacking such diverse plants as the sweet potato (''black rot'') and the tapping panels of the Para rubber tree (''moldy rot''). It is a diverse species that attacks a wide variety of ...

'') was devastating crops in the region. Gock and her husband developed a disease-resistant strain and gifted stock for the use of other farmers. They also experimented with storage methods and invested in a curing shed that reduced wastage from up to 50% to less than 1%. For 40 years, Gock grew

rhubarb Rhubarb is the fleshy, edible stalks ( petioles) of species and hybrids (culinary rhubarb) of ''Rheum'' in the family Polygonaceae, which are cooked and used for food. The whole plant – a herbaceous perennial growing from short, thick rhizo ...

as a backyard hobby, refining the strain to improve production. For a long time there was little market for it, but when others stopped growing it, demand increased and the business was soon exporting rhubarb to England and Japan. Meanwhile, she planted a low-lying area with

taro Taro () (''Colocasia esculenta)'' is a root vegetable. It is the most widely cultivated species of several plants in the family Araceae that are used as vegetables for their corms, leaves, and petioles. Taro corms are a food staple in Africa ...

, and sold the leaves for use in Pacific Islander

umu Umu may refer to: * A variety of earth ovens in Polynesia, including: ** Māori umu tī, used to cook ''Cordyline australis'' and other varieties of Cordyline with similar large tap roots. ** Māori hāngi, also called umu in Samoa, especially in o ...

cooking.

Awards and recognition

In 2013, Gock and her husband jointly received the Bledisloe Cup for services to horticulture, citing their work as "pioneers" in the field. In 2016 Gock and her husband's work was covered in a documentary file titled "How Mr and Mrs Gock Saved the Kumara".

Personal life and death

Gock had three daughters: Jayne, Virginia, and Raewyn. She died after a sudden illness on 21 December 2018.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gock, Fay 1933 births 2018 deaths 20th-century New Zealand women 21st-century New Zealand women New Zealand horticulturists Chinese emigrants to New Zealand