Some leafy vegetables need to be covered and deprived of light to flourish and offer their finest finery as well as good taste qualities.
To obtain certain vegetables that are more crunchy, less bitter and tastier, the bleaching technique exists. It consists of depriving the vegetables of light before harvesting them. A short overview of how to blanch vegetables from the vegetable garden.
When to blanch vegetables?
Bleaching or bleaching vegetables is the act of depriving a plant or part of a plant of natural light. Also called etiolation. Thus, they experience a cessation of photosynthesis and can no longer produce chlorophyll. They are thus more tender, tastier and less bitter. This is the case for the chicory and the dandelions. Blanching takes place between 2 and 3 weeks before harvesting the vegetable.
How to blanch vegetables in the vegetable garden?
Several methods are available to you depending on the vegetables. Here are the most common:
- tie them: with a flexible tie, the lettuce leaves are simply tied to harvest yellowed leaves like chicory;
- cover them: there are market garden covers in dark plastic or terracotta which, once placed on the vegetables, deprive them of light for two weeks. They land directly on chicory, dandelions, rhubarb or Barbe-de-capuchin salads. You can also improvise cloches with upturned opaque plastic buckets or upturned terracotta pots, with the drainage hole plugged;
- mounding them: mounding of vegetables consists of setting up mounds at the foot of the vegetables so that the earth deprives part of the vegetables of light. The gardener whitens the leeks to obtain large white barrels, and asparagus;
- camouflage them: it is sometimes necessary to deprive tall leaves of vegetables such as cardoons or celery stalks. The bell being too small, sleeves are used. Purchased or made with pieces of cardboard or kraft paper, these sleeves are tied with a string and surround the leaves;
- shelter them: endives can be grown in the vegetable garden in a trench covered with earth as well as in a cellar, placed in a box of earth mixed with peat for six weeks. This technique is interesting when the winter days arrive and the last harvests take place.
For all these techniques, space out the placement so as not to have all the vegetables mature at the same time.
Namely: for asparagus, there are three colors: white, those that will remain in cultivation all the time under mounds of earth; violet, those whose tips have remained exposed to the sun; green, those that have not been mounded and have grown exposed to light.
Did you know ?
When growing potatoes, ridging is mandatory. It allows you to keep the tubers in the ground and above all not to expose them to light, otherwise you will harvest green, inedible potatoes.
