Grow Your Own Salad

Stepping out your back door to forage for fresh salad ingredients is one of the many delights of gardening.

Start growing your own cucumbers, lettuce, radish and rocket in September and you’ll be eating home grown salad in no time.

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 as the plants can grow up to 1.5m tall.

Yates Lettuce Cut Come Again 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 Radish Salad Crunch 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 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 Japanese Turnip Hakurei is a delightful addition to a salad. This variety produces beautiful white skinned turnips with a crisp, delicate-flavoured flesh. Also known as salad turnips, they are delicious raw, chopped or grated into salads, and excellent roasted or sautéed, or in soups and pickles. The leafy tops can be eaten like spinach.

How to Grow:

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

• Once the seedlings are established, apply some Yates Thrive Natural Fish Blood Bone Plant Food Concentrate around the root zone. It’s a complete plant food for vegies and herbs like cucumber, lettuce, radish and rocket that’s a natural source of organic nutrients boosted with fast acting fertilisers to encourage healthy vegie and herb growth.

• Aphid watch: aphids are sap sucking insect pests that are attracted to the soft tender young growth on vegie & herb seedlings. They can adversely affect plant health and reduce your harvest. Aphids are easy to control Yates Natures Way Vegie Insect Spray Natrasoap Ready to Use, which is an insecticidal soap spray that controls insects like aphids and is certified for use in organic gardens.

Home grown favourite

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

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.