Chicory salad - a useful type of vegetable that enriches the human body with valuable substances. It has an interesting feature - it grows in the winter, when there are no other vegetables. About how to grow salad chicory, when to plant, and what benefits it brings, read the article.
Origin
Belgian farmer first announced chicory salad. It was in the year eighteen hundred and thirty. Since then, chicory salad is known all over the world. An amazing vegetable native to North India. As soon as it became known to people, they began to grow it specially in countries such as Holland, France, England, the Baltic States and the Mediterranean.
Description
Salad chicory is a popular name for a vegetable. The herbaceous plant has cultivated varieties. Only three of them are grown in summer cottages:
- Endive - curly, with cut leaves.
- Vitluf - leaves are wide, the head is large, has similarities with the Romain salad.
- Escariol - a rosette is formed by wide uncut leaves, on the surface of which there are fleshy veins.
Salad chicory belongs to a large family with a beautiful name - “daisies”. This plant has a head of cabbage and green leaves. Endive salad is characterized by curly leaves with rich color. Because of this, it is very similar to a regular salad. But this is a salad vegetable.
The bitter taste of endive does not allow to attribute it to the category of the most popular varieties of salad, however, today it is common in America and Europe. Here it is appreciated and consumed in large quantities.
The chicory, the photo of which you see, is a cream-colored head of cabbage, on which blots of green are indicated. Leaves are smooth, not dissected at the apex. The head of cabbage reaches a length of twelve centimeters.
Growing
Salad chicory, cultivated in winter in crates, at home or in greenhouses, is valued for rhizomes and heads of cabbage, and most importantly, for the opportunity to get fresh and healthy vegetables in cold weather. Salad 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 of cabbage are grown from them.
For the comfortable growth of salad chicory, loamy, well-fertilized soils are needed, which are prepared in the fall. To do this, they introduce manure or rotted compost per square meter of one or two buckets. A good top dressing is superphosphate and nitrophos. It is enough to add one or three tablespoons of these fertilizers to 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, the seeds of salad chicory are soaked for swelling. Before sowing, the soil loosens 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. Deep planting of seeds will lead to their late germination. The distance between the seeds should be no more than three centimeters.
When the seedlings come up, 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. The care is simple: water on time, avoiding drying out, shallow loosening and weeding.
Harvesting root crops
After mid-October, they begin to clean the salad. 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 kidney is not damaged in the future. Soil from root crops is not cleaned off. In this form, they lay in the cellar for storage. The temperature should be no more than two degrees 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 of November. Garden soil is mixed with peat, compost or turf soil. Other mixtures are also used, for example, soil with sawdust.
In the box, the roots will grow. When their length reaches twelve centimeters, and the diameter is three, root crops are planted in containers. This work must be done carefully so that the location of the shoots is the same. After this, the soil is added eighteen to twenty centimeters above the level of the tops.
The box with planted root vegetables is covered with a material that does not transmit light, and is put into the room for two weeks. The temperature should be ten to fourteen degrees heat. After this period, chicory continues to be grown for another two weeks, but the temperature in the room is raised to twenty degrees.
The heading period lasts a total of twenty-four days. Heads of cabbage grow up, their weight makes one hundred fifty-one hundred eighty grams.
Growing in the dark leaves its mark - the surface of the heads is completely white. It is easy to remove salad chicory: just pull it out of the soil. But that is not all. Heads of cabbage need to be cut off, leaving a small part of root crops, two centimeters are enough. Only after that lettuce crop is placed in storage with air temperature up to zero degrees. Heads are immediately packed with plastic wrap, stored for up to twenty days.
The benefits of endive
Chicory salad has in its composition substances with special properties that help to cope with many diseases:
- Endive has the ability to have a positive effect in the healing of the kidneys and liver. With regular use of endive, a powerful effect is achieved: stagnation of bile disappears.
- Due to the high content of vitamin A, salad is used to prevent cancer.
- Chicory is especially useful in the spring, when the human body is exhausted by a lack of nutrients, especially vitamins of group C, which are contained in large quantities in the salad.
- Chicory, whose photo you see below, is rich in manganese involved in the production of enzymes. And thanks to the high potassium content, the body is struggling with a disease such as hypertension.
- Vitamin B as part of endive helps people cope with stress, neurological diseases, mental illness.
- An effective tool for healing the body is chicory juice. Its use eliminates many problems that cause a person to feel unwell: the skin rash and anemia disappear, vision is normalized, and the gallbladder is restored.
- The taste of salad juice is very bitter. It is not consumed in its pure form, only in combination with the juices of other vegetables. For example, a drink is prepared from carrot, celery and endive juice, which helps reduce the number of asthma attacks. You can make another juice: parsley, celery and chicory. This drink is an effective tonic to combat anemia.
Weight loss with endive
On the menu of each person should be chicory salad. The benefits and harms are determined by the individual characteristics of the body. But it is clear that endive contributes to the loss of excess weight. This is achieved by removing excess fluid.
It is recommended to include endive in the diet, 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
If you use a moderate amount of endive, it only benefits, there are no side effects, as well as contraindications. 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.
It should also be borne in mind that vitamin A has a very high concentration. Its combination with alcoholic drinks and tobacco gives a bad result. Therefore, you do not need to drink alcohol and tobacco six hours before consuming dishes with chicory and after.
Owning information, everyone decides whether to consume endive salad or not.