Salad Brothers director Chris Carrick. Photo / Bevan Conley
Salad Brothers director Chris Carrick. Photo / Bevan Conley
The emergence of family-run business Salad Brothers has breathed new life into an old lettuce farm in Waverley, South Taranaki.
Director Chris Carrick said he got interested in lettuce farming when his son showed him the property, which was up for sale.
It piqued his interest which led to him,his wife Marianne Archibald, her brother Garth and his wife Christine Bell partnering as directors to form the business.
Archibald said a different part of the business interested each of the four.
“Chris really loves horticulture and Christine really likes gardening as well and Garth likes science and I like marketing,” she said.
It was later sold to Te Kaahui o Rauru in 2020, with Carrick and company buying the farm at the end of 2022.
He credited the iwi with allowing them to move in early to begin the repair work, such as weeding the grounds and replacing the hydroponic water system.
The farm was still being restored even now production had started, with the farm directors having never grown lettuce before and learning as they went.
“When we first started we first planted 7000 seeds and didn’t realise that you have to cover them for the first week so ... we ended up with really fat birds,” Carrick said.
The seeds are initially planted in soil, covered to stop birds from eating them and thoroughly soaked with water to ensure the seeds germinate.
“The seeds are encapsulated in a clay stuff ... they won’t germinate until they’re softened and broken.”
This was taught to them by the former owner of the farm, Corrina Robertson, who is now working for Salad Brothers.
“We’re really lucky to have the expertise of Corrina ... she’s helping us out heaps with how to do stuff, so things that would have been really hit-and-miss for us - she’s just like, here’s how you do it,” Archibald said.
Once the plants are big enough, they are taken out of the soil and placed into hydroponic gulleys, growing without soil and being fed by a nutrient solution in the water.
The mixture of the solution was carefully controlled by two vats and pumped around the farm, with sensors making sure its pH and electricity levels stayed constant.
Salad Brothers is growing a range of lettuce varieties. Photo / Bevan Conley
Currently, the farm is growing a variety of red and green lettuce including lorenzo, coral, oakleaf and iceberg.
Carrick said the icebergs would be their biggest challenge as the farm had not grown them before, so they were learning how to get the best result.
There was no off-season for lettuce production, with the plants taking eight weeks to go from seedlings to harvest in the summer months and 14-16 weeks in winter.
The business had its first harvest this week, with produce trucked out to Bidfood wholesaler in New Plymouth and samples being dropped off along the way.
“The driver’s been instructed, ‘anywhere you see that might like lettuce, pull over, drop off a bag and slip them a letter’,” Carrick said.
At its peak when it was Hydroponic Fresh, the farm produced around 1 million lettuces a year.
Carrick said he did not know if they would aim for that level of production but were keeping busy with the farm.
“We’re planting between 10,000 and 12,000 seeds every week so, yeah, we’ve got a lot of lettuces to get into the gulleys,” he said.
Archibald hoped to eventually sell lettuces in supermarkets across the region and said people in Waverley had missed being able to get their lettuce locally.
“It’s nice to have a family business and make sure a local business in a little town like this thrives. It’s good for the people and everyone was missing the lettuce so people are pretty excited to have it back up and running.”
The business was being run with an eco-friendly focus, with the first batches of lettuce being bagged in old Hydroponic Fresh bags left behind by the previous owner.
“We don’t want to waste thousands of plastic bags, it seems heinous to chuck them out and I don’t know who else would use them,” Archibald said.
Once the last of the old bags were used, the lettuce would be bagged using Salad Brothers’ own branding.
