His grandma got him into gardening. Declan remembers pulling out carrots and potatoes from the garden to cook up for dinner.

Now the Bethlehem youngster has won the Central North Island Budding Young Gardener title as part of the national search for the inaugural Yates Budding Young Gardener 2018 competition.

As part of the competition the 13-year-old created a vegetable garden from scratch, clearing out a portion of overgrown garden, weeding, digging and setting down edging before composting and planting, all recorded on time-lapse video over a day of hard work.

'This was a new project for me and my first solo attempt at gardening,” says Declan. 'I have always pottered in my grandparents' garden and helped out my parents, but I just decided to do this myself this time.

'I've planted radish, beetroot, rocket, carrots and silverbeet and am looking forward to harvesting them. I'm not the average sort of kid who is fussy about eating veggies.

Declan is also working with his parents on a restoration project on family land, clearing gorse and planting native trees.

He says once that is completed he has plans to attack the rest of the garden at home and expand his vegetable patch.

Declan won a Yates hamper worth over $300 and is lining up alongside seven other regional winners for the grand prize of a trip to Australia, becoming a Yates Ambassador for a year and spending time in his garden with a Yates horticulturist.

The grand winner is decided by public vote and Declan is hoping all of Bay of Plenty will get behind him.

Fiona Arthur from Yates says the Budding Young Gardener competition aims to celebrate a love of gardening and encourage children of all levels of capability to further develop their passion.

'Getting our kids outside and into nature is one of the best things we can do for them,” says Fiona. 'We want children to not only learn how to grow food, flowers and trees but to have fun and understand the wider biodiversity.

'There have been so many excellent entries this year it put our judges, Ruud Kleinpaste and Sarah O'Neil under pressure to just pick one regional winner but we look forward to doing it again next Spring,” says Fiona.

The grand winner will be announced during National Gardening Week from October 15-22.

To vote for Declan Lang visit https://a.cstmapp.com/p/27268. Voting closes on October 5 at 5pm.