Many like fresh crispy salads, it's a storehouse of vitamins. Their delicious and dietary greens contain all the necessary useful substances to man. In addition, they are all low-calorie. There are many varieties of leaf salads, which are conventionally divided into head and leaf. Leaf salads are bushes made from leaves collected in a rosette. The leaves of cabbage salads form a head (dense or more friable).
Let's talk about one of the most popular cabbage salads - an iceberg, and learn how to plant and grow it. Homeland of this sort of salad is America. Externally, an iceberg salad is like a cabbage cabbage: round dense heads can reach a weight of 1 kg. Its leaves are light green, juicy and crunchy, with fine-toothed edges. You need to store the iceberg salad by wrapping it in a damp cloth and placing it in a bag. In this form it can be stored in the refrigerator for up to 3 weeks.
Iceberg salad has a pleasant, slightly sweet taste. Therefore, it successfully combines with any dishes and sauces. As a rule, every vegetable grower can grow an iceberg salad in his cottage.
Planting and care for the iceberg salad
If you want to have a green salad on your table during the whole year, then in spring and summer the seeds are sown with an interval of a week, and in the autumn - in two weeks. To grow an iceberg lettuce, you need to choose only a sunny place, and the soil must be sandy, loamy, containing a large amount of humus. Salad iceberg does not tolerate a drought, and it must be watered regularly. And if there is no such possibility, it is better not to plant it on light, dry soils.
Growing salad iceberg can be produced by seedlings (spring and summer crops) or seeds for the winter. In any case, before planting the seeds must be soaked in order that earlier emerged seedlings. To get seedlings, the soaked seeds of iceberg lettuce should be planted in peat pots, which are placed in a cool room, where the air temperature does not exceed 18 ° С. There they are kept for two days, after which they put them in a warmer room with a temperature of up to 25 ° C. Here seedlings should stand until they have 4-5 real leaves.
Before planting seedlings on a permanent place it should be hardened for 3-4 days, taking the pots to fresh air. 2 weeks after sowing, the iceberg lettuce seedlings can be planted in rows on a bed. The distance between the rows should be approximately 40 cm, and the distance between the plants in the rows is up to 30 cm.
If you want to plant salad seeds for the winter, care should be taken to prepare the soil. To do this, you need 1 square. m of land to make about 1 kg of wood ash , a bucket of compost and 3 spoons of complex mineral fertilizers. After that, you can already sow the seeds in the soil, increasing their consumption by about half, since after wintering not all the seedlings will germinate. Now you need to hide the seed beds with the fallen leaves.
You can plant an iceberg salad with seeds and in the spring. After the soil melts a little, we seed the seeds to a depth of about 1 cm. Iceberg salad is a cold-resistant plant, its shoots can withstand a temperature of -6 ° C, and at a temperature of about + 5 ° C the seeds begin to germinate. At this time, they must be covered with film or agrofiber to ensure the necessary soil moisture. Periodically you need
After the temperature rises to 17 ° C under the film, the coating can be removed. And do it better in the evening, as in the daytime a bright sun can cause a burn in young plants.
Care for the iceberg salad is to loosen the soil, regular watering and mandatory removal of weeds. After the heads have started to form, watering should be reduced in order to avoid the appearance of rot.
Collecting the iceberg salad harvest is better in the morning, then it will remain crispy and juicy. Cut cabbage should be stored in the cold.