Chicory salad is a he althy type of vegetable that enriches the human body with valuable substances. It has an interesting feature - it grows in winter, when there are no other vegetables. How to grow lettuce chicory, when to plant, and what benefits it brings, read the article.
Origin
A Belgian farmer first announced chicory salad. It was in the year eighteen hundred and thirty. Since then, chicory salad has been known all over the world. An amazing vegetable native to North India. As soon as it became known to people, it began to be grown specifically in countries such as Holland, France, England, the B altics and the Mediterranean.
Description
Chicory salad is the popular name of the vegetable. The herbaceous plant has cultivated varieties. Only three of them are grown in summer cottages:
- Endive - curly, with cut leaves.
- Witloof - wide leaves, large head, similar to romaine lettuce.
- Escariole - a rosette form wide uncut leaves, on the surface of which there are fleshy veins.
Lettuce chicory belongs to a large family with a beautiful name - "daisies". This plant has a head and green leaves. Endive lettuce is characterized by curly leaves with rich color. Because of this, it is very similar to a regular salad. But it's a salad vegetable.
The bitter taste of endive does not allow it to be classified as the most popular lettuce variety, however, today it is common in America and Europe. Here it is valued and eaten in large quantities.
Chicory, the photo of which you see, is a cream-colored head of cabbage, on which blotches of green are indicated. The leaves are smooth, not dissected at the top. A head of cabbage reaches a length of twelve centimeters.
Growing
Chicory salad, which is grown in winter in boxes, at home or in greenhouses, is valued for its rhizomes and heads, and most importantly, for the opportunity to get a fresh and he althy vegetable in cold weather. Lettuce chicory is grown in two stages:
- First, seeds are sown, from which root crops are obtained.
- In the next stage, root crops are planted in the ground. Heads are grown from them.
For the comfortable growth of lettuce chicory, loamy, well-fertilized soils are needed, which are prepared in the fall. To do this, they add manure or rotted compost per square meter to them.area of one or two buckets. A good top dressing is superphosphate and nitrophoska. It is enough to apply one to three spoons of these fertilizers on the same area of land.
Chicory salad: growing from seeds
When to plant planting material, the weather will tell. But the best time for this is early spring. Sowing seeds should begin in April and end in May. Before planting, lettuce chicory seeds are soaked to swell. Before sowing, the soil is loosened and grooves are made at a distance of sixteen centimeters from each other. Seeds are buried in the soil by one and a half to two centimeters. Planting seeds too deep will result in late germination. The distance between the seeds should be no more than three centimeters.
When the seedlings sprout, they need to be thinned out twice. The first time the distance between each plant should be six centimeters, and the second - thirty.
The last thinning should be carried out after a month and a half, when the seedlings grow a little. Care is simple: water in time, avoiding drying out, loosen and weed shallowly.
Harvesting root crops
After mid-October, they start harvesting lettuce. To do this, you need to dig up the root crops without removing the tops, put them in one pile and leave them on the site for a period of five to six days.
Then the tops are cut off, three centimeters are left so that the apical bud is not damaged in the future. The soil from the root crops is not cleaned off. In this form, they lay in the cellar for storage. The temperature should be no more than twodegrees of heat. Many gardeners immediately plant root crops in the ground, without leaving them for storage.
Getting Heads
At this stage of cultivation, root crops should be planted in pre-prepared boxes with soil. Landing time falls on the first days of November. Garden soil is mixed with peat, compost or turf soil. Other mixtures are also used, for example, soil with sawdust.
Roots will grow in the box. When their length reaches twelve centimeters and their diameter reaches three, the root crops are planted in containers. This work must be done carefully so that the level of location of the processes is the same. After that, the soil is filled up eighteen to twenty centimeters above the level of the tops.
A box with planted root crops is covered with a material that does not transmit light, and placed in a room for two weeks. The temperature should be ten to fourteen degrees Celsius. After this period, chicory continues to be grown for another two weeks, but the temperature in the room is raised to twenty degrees.
The head growing period lasts a total of twenty-four days. The heads of cabbage are growing, their weight is one hundred and fifty to one hundred and eighty grams.
Growing in the dark leaves an imprint - the surface of the heads is completely white. Harvesting lettuce chicory is easy: just pull it out of the soil. But that is not all. Heads of cabbage need to be cut, leaving a small part of the root crops, two centimeters are enough. Only after that the lettuce crop is placed in storage with air temperature down to zero.degrees. Heads of cabbage are immediately packed with plastic wrap, stored for up to twenty days.
Benefits of endive
Chicory salad contains substances with special properties that help to cope with many diseases:
- Endive has the ability to have a positive effect on the he alth of the kidneys and liver. With regular use of endive, a powerful effect is achieved: bile stasis disappears.
- Due to the high content of vitamin A, lettuce is used to prevent cancer.
- Chicory is especially useful in spring, when the human body is depleted of a lack of nutrients, especially vitamins of group C, which are found in large quantities in lettuce.
- Chicory, the photo of which is shown below, is rich in manganese, which is involved in the production of enzymes. And thanks to the high content of potassium, the body fights against diseases such as hypertension.
- Vitamin B in endive helps people cope with stress, neurological diseases, mental illness.
- Chicory juice is an effective remedy for healing the body. Its use eliminates many problems that cause a person to feel unwell: a rash on the skin and anemia disappear, vision normalizes, and the gallbladder is restored.
- Salad juice tastes very bitter. It is not used in its pure form, only in combination with the juices of other vegetables. For example, from the juice of carrots, celery and endive, a drink is prepared thathelps reduce the number of asthma attacks. You can make other juice: parsley, celery and chicory. This drink is an effective tonic for fighting anemia.
Slimming with endive
Every person's menu should have chicory salad. Benefits and harms are determined by the individual characteristics of the organism. But it is unequivocal that endive contributes to the loss of excess weight. This is achieved by removing excess fluid.
It is recommended to include endive in dietary dishes, as the salad saturates the body with the necessary amount of minerals and vitamins, but contains only seventeen kilocalories per hundred grams of the product.
Harm chicory
When consumed in moderation, endive brings only benefits, there are no side effects, as well as contraindications for use. But sometimes it is worth considering the intolerance of some components in the composition of the vegetable. The manifestation of individual reactions is an allergy or an eating disorder.
Also keep in mind that vitamin A has a very high concentration. Its combination with alcoholic beverages and tobacco gives a bad result. Therefore, you should not consume alcohol and tobacco six hours before and after eating chicory dishes.
Having the information, everyone decides for himself whether to eat endive salad or not.
