GROWING OUR ENDIVES
Chicons - Witloof - Endives !
Update 15/12/2024 : Our endives are growing nicely and will be ready for sale starting Saturday, December 21st. Just in time for Christmas!
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The endive is not just a vegetable here in Belgium but a fond culinary tradition going back centuries. It has been a prized vegetable grown by farmers in dark and controlled environments to produce its characteristic pale yellow-white colour and mild bitterness.
The endive adds a unique flavour profile to recipes. It can be eaten raw in salads for a crunchy texture or cooked, braised and caramelized as a side dish or as a main dish like the famous ‘chicon au gratin’.
How healthy are endives? Very! They are a highly nutritious vegetable with potassium, vitamin K, C, A, antioxidants and folate. Thankfully there are a variety of ways to add these vegetables into your diet.
Getting our endive roots into the ground was a multi-step process to ensure we provided them with the best conditions to grow . The preparation of the soil and roots and finally planting over a thousand of them required a certain amount of work and time set aside.
However, a delicious result awaits in January!
The Process
There are a few stages of preparation before the endives can be planted.
We put together a short video of our process and how we prepared and planted our endives. You can watch the full video here on Facebook.
First, we dug a shallow pit around 30cm deep. We then installed a heating cable in the earth that was later covered with a layer soil. This created the ideal environment for our 1,500 endive chicory roots to grow snuggly in warmth and in the dark.
Before we planted the endive roots, we trimmed the tops of each one to refresh the existing foliage. We placed each one by one in the ground upright until the whole pit was filled.
An important tip for planting endives is to try to place each root at the same height as much as possible. This allows for consistent growth and easier harvesting of the vegetable.
After placing each row, we added dirt in between the endives to make sure there was soil medium surrounding each root. It took about three hours for the two of us to place all the endive roots in the pit. Definitely a lot more faster than if it was one of us!
The last step was to create a ‘roof’ of hay and overlay a dark cloth to ensure no light could reach our endives in the ground. This roof also helps to keep the roots warm and accelerate growth. They grow quite quickly once in the ground under their warm ‘blanket’.
Here you can see little white hairs forming at the roots. This picture was after one week of planting. Their little yellow-green tops easily appeared.
Within 4-5 weeks, the endives are ready for harvesting. In mid January, our first endives will be ready for sale at our tables!