Cichorium endivia
Endive
Common names: Endive salad, Winter endive
At a glance
- Light
- Full sun
- Spacing
- 30 cm, rows 35 cm
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Sowing
- Jun–Aug
- Harvest
- Sep–Nov
- Hardiness
- Cold damage below −5 °C
- Water need
- Medium
This description was machine-translated.
Description
The endive is a typical autumn and winter salad with serrated or bushy leaves and a pleasantly bitter flavor. While spring and summer salads are long gone, it still provides crisp, slightly bitter green until late November, raw or lightly sautéed.
Care instructions
Sow in June for an autumn harvest and keep the soil consistently moist. To mellow the bitterness, loosely bundle the heads one to two weeks before harvest or cover them, this bleaches the heart and makes it gentler and milder. It tolerates light frosts; for harsher frost, protect with fleece or harvest beforehand.
The care notes were machine-translated from German.
Garden year
SowingJun–Aug
HarvestSep–Nov
Germination
- Soil temperature
- from 5 °C, ideally 20 °C
- Days to sprout
- 4 to 10 days
- Light
- Sprouts in light or dark
- Sowing depth
- 0.5 cm
- How to start
- Start indoors, then plant out
Soil & site
Soil pH
Soil type
humus-rich, loamy, well-drained, nutrient-rich
Endive likes deeply loosened, humus-rich, free-draining soil without waterlogging, otherwise root rot threatens. Medium-heavy, humus-rich garden soil is ideal; it is better to avoid very sandy or heavy, compacted soils.
Lettuce and other members of the daisy family are light to moderate feeders. A break of about 3 years is enough, and they are well suited as gap fillers between the main crops.
Feeding
Medium feeder
Months
Apr–Jun
Work mature compost shallowly into the bed in autumn or spring; shortly before planting out, you can additionally rake in some horn shavings at the surface. Avoid fresh manure, because it promotes rot. Give nitrogen only sparingly: too much makes the leaves bitter, shortens the keeping quality and favours tipburn (calcium-related leaf-edge rot).
Overwintering
Endive is an annual vegetable and is not overwintered: harvest the heads before lasting frost comes. It tolerates light cold; smooth-leaved varieties hold out longer than curly ones. If lasting frosts threaten, cover the bed with horticultural fleece and ventilate on sunny days against rot, or lift the plants and heel them in with their roots in moist sand, cool and frost-free in the cellar; sow anew the following year.
Propagation
Methods
- From seed
Endives are propagated only by sowing. You have two main windows: for an early summer harvest, start them from March to April in pots on the windowsill (germination temperature 16 to 20 °C) and plant the young plants into the bed after 3 to 4 weeks, about 30 cm apart. More dependable is the autumn and winter harvest: for this, sow directly outdoors from mid-June to the end of July, best only after 21 June. The reason is mainly temperature: if an endive sown too early gets longer cool spells below about 16 °C, this cold stimulus irreversibly triggers flower formation (the dreaded “bolting”), and you harvest flower stems instead of leaf rosettes. Very long days of over 14 hours also favour bolting, but act more weakly than the cold. After the summer solstice the days get shorter again, which calms the plant. Lay the seeds about 0.5 to 1 cm deep in rows about 30 cm apart and later thin to 30 cm in the row. Keep the soil evenly moist until germination; it germinates after about 1 to 2 weeks. Temperatures above 28 °C inhibit germination. In heat, find a partially shaded spot or shade the seed row. If you choose bolt-resistant varieties, the risk falls further.
Companion planting
Good neighbors
carrot family (Apiaceae)
Calendula and Tagetes next to carrots keep the carrot fly away with their scent.
For example CeleriacDillParsleyFlorence fennelCorianderCelery (Stalk Celery) and 20 more species in the catalogue
Source: classic companion planting (DACH-Gartenpraxis)
Companion planting is partly traditional gardening lore. Where the reason is known, it is given.
Some of these explanations were machine-translated.
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