Bright brassicas
Tasty varieties will spice up your meals for the autumn
There are plenty of things to keep you busy in the veggie and herb patch during February. It’s a great time to sow these interesting, tasty brassicas — great varieties to try if you’re keen to spice up your meals for autumn.
Bok Choy
Also known as Chinese White Cabbage, Bok Choy has a delicate, sweet flavour, a crisp and crunchy texture and is packed with nutritious goodness.
This traditional variety has juicy, snow-white stems and jade green leaves.
Perfect for gentle steaming, stirfrying, or in soups. Sensational saute´ ed with ginger and garlic.
Cabbage ‘Red Mini’
A favourite early red cabbage, with tightly wrapped heads, and a vibrant plum colour.
Cabbage Red Mini is crisp and pleasantly peppery in taste, and delicious cooked or chopped raw for salads and slaws.
If closely planted, they will produce petite single-serve red cabbages.
Kohlrabi ‘Green Duke’
Kohlrabi Green Duke Hybrid tastes like a mild, sweet turnip with a crisp hint of radish.
The bulbous stem and leaves are all edible. The bulb is delicious raw, grated or shaved into slaws or salads. Delightful roasted and caramelised in the oven, steamed, used in a creamy soup, or pure´ ed.
Kohlrabi is a favourite in Indian cuisine, so it naturally pairs with Indian spices.
Try peeling with a potato peeler and adding them to a baking tray of “roasties”. Yum!
Grow a Ruby
Silverbeet Ruby Chard — the veggie patch doesn’t need to be a sea of green! Yates Silverbeet Ruby Chard produces striking bright red stems together with nutritious leaves that are great for salads and stir fries. Ruby Chard makes a very hardy, attractive and tasty addition to the veggie patch.
How to Grow:
Seed can be sown directly into a garden bed or medium-sized pot or seedlings raised in trays of Yates Black Magic Seed Raising Mix and transplanted when they’re around 5cm tall.
Harvest leaves as you need them by pulling (rather than cutting) stems, starting with the outside leaves.
As your leafy greens grow, water them regularly and each week apply some Yates Thrive Natural Fish Seaweed Concentrate. It’s a complete and balanced fertiliser that contains a combination of natural and fastacting nutrients, plus humates, molasses, trace elements and microbes to encourage lots of leafy green growth and improved soil health.
Leafy greens pest watch:
Control snails and slugs by scattering some Yates Blitzem Snail Slug Pellets over the soil around the plants.
■ For more information and inspiration visit yates.co.nz