Grow Your Own Salad

Spontaneous Salads:

Ready When You Are

Stepping out your back door to forage for fresh salad ingredients is one of the many delights of gardening; the fresher the leaves, the better they taste. Start growing your own cucumbers, lettuce, radish, rocket and spinach in September and you’ll be eating home grown salad in no time. Salad greens and leafy herbs can be grown from seed from September to May, in most of NZ.

How to Grow & Protect Salad Greens:

• Before sowing your salad ingredients, improve the soil first with some Yates Thrive Natural Blood & Bone. It helps enrich the soil (it's a natural soil conditioner) and encourages earthworms and beneficial soil microorganisms. It's also boosted with NZ seaweed to promote strong root growth.

• Once the seedlings are established, apply some Yates Thrive Natural Fish & Seaweed+ Plant Food over them and around their root zone. It’s a complete plant food that delivers rich, naturally-derived ingredients, fortified with fast acting macronutrients to encourage generous growth. It also contains valuable seaweed compounds, humates, biostimulants and trace elements to boost plants, and the microbial community in the soil underneath them (these microbes help to feed your plants) It's ideal for vegies and herbs like cucumber, lettuce, radish and rocket.

• Watch out for aphids: these sap-sucking little horrors are attracted to the soft tender growth on vegie and herb seedlings. If left unchecked, they can badly affect plant health and reduce your harvest. Aphids are easy to control with Yates Natures Way Vegie Insect Spray Natrasoap, an insecticidal soap-based spray that's certified for use in organic gardens.

• Caterpillars aren't very welcome guests in a salad, plus they help themselves to large portions of the leaves you're planning to eat! Fortunately, it's pretty straightforward to keep caterpillars off your greens and prevent them chewing big, unsightly holes. Yates Nature's Way Fruit & Vegie Gun is a handy, ready-to-use solution to have on hand by the kitchen door - it's always ready to go, as soon as you spot a pest on your salad greens.

• If you're growing cucumbers or herbs, keep an eye out for whitefly. They're easy to see: if the plant host is disturbed, a distinctive fluttery cloud of tiny white insects fly out, then settle back onto the same plant. Whiteflies suck the juices from the plant, causing wilted and yellowing leaves and stunting the new growth. Whitefly aren't easy to control, so they need a product with some extra 'oomph'; we recommend Yates Nature's Way Natrasoap Vegie Insect Spray Ensure you get complete spray coverage, including on the underside of leaves.

Here are a few of our favourite choices for an attractive 'potager' garden, that grow fast and don't take up much space (apart from the cucumbers, which have a small footprint but do need vertical space to climb). Even if you only have space for pots, you can have a kitchen garden!

• Yates 'Cut & Come Again' Lettuce provides a continual supply of delightfully fresh salad leaves. Simply snip leaves off the plant as you need them. Best mass planted, so you can keep plenty of new leaves on the go.
• Yates 'Salad Crunch' Radishes are easy to grow and can be sown direct into a sunny spot in the garden or into containers. Finely shaved radish makes a crunchy and colourful addition to salads.
• Yates Heirloom Lettuce 'Oak Leaf' has sweet-tasting, attractive oak tree-shaped leaves in a loose rosette. Great for wraps and sandwiches as well as salads: perfect for taking as much or as little as you need.
• Yates Rocket 'Large Leaf' is a rapid grower with peppery tasting leaves that add zest to salads. Rocket can be grown in a full sun or partly shaded spot in both the vegie patch and pots.
• Yates 'Hakurei' Japanese Turnips are a little bit special, and a delightful addition to a salad. They're quite unlike the familiar old-fashioned turnip, as these taste lovely when they're eaten raw. 'Hakurei' produces beautiful little white skinned turnips with a crisp, delicate-flavoured flesh. Also known as salad turnips, they're delicious shaved, chopped or grated into salads, taste sweet when roasted or sautéed, and are right at home in soups and pickles. The leafy tops can be eaten like spinach. Pro tip: drizzle them with whisked olive oil and miso paste, then pop them in the oven to roast. Sensational!
• Yates 'Long Green' Cucumber has sweet, crisp emerald green fruit that only take 8-10 weeks to harvest. They’ll need a trellis or tripod to climb up though, as the plants can grow up to 1.5m tall.

Warm, Humid Climate?

This is the Tomato for You.

Delicious heirloom Grosse Lisse tomatoes have been enjoyed by Kiwi home gardeners for generations.

Yates Tomato Grosse Lisse is a heavy yielding tomato that has large round juicy red fruit. The clue is in the name – Grosse Lisse is French and translates roughly to “Big Smooth”. It’s a tall growing, vigorous variety that will need support with some stakes or a tomato cage.

It can be grown in a sunny garden bed and also containers, so balcony and courtyard gardeners don’t need to miss out on growing this tasty tomato.

Here’s how to get your Yates Grosse Lisse Tomatoes started:

• Seed can be sown direct into a vegie patch that’s had the soil enriched with some Yates Thrive Natural Blood Bone with Seaweed or sown into seedling punnets filled with a good quality seed raising mix like Yates Black Magic Seed Raising Mix.

• Sow seed 6 mm deep, cover with seed raising mix and water gently.

• Keep the soil or seed raising mix moist and seedlings will start to emerge in around 6 – 12 days.

• For seedlings raised in punnets they can be transplanted into their final home, in either a garden bed or a container, when they’re 5 – 7 cm tall. Only transplant out once there will be no more frosts!

• In a fortnight, start feeding each week with Yates Thrive Tomato Liquid Plant Food or Yates Thrive Natural Tomato Vegie Plant Food Concentrate  which will provide the tomatoes with a balanced diet of nutrients to promote lots of healthy growth and encourage lots of flowers which will turn into delicious fruit.