Living Greener: Chicory will give you fresh vitamins through the winter

Chicory isn’t a widely grown garden plant here in Ireland, but it grows well through our summers, and can be grown both for its leaves and its root. What you do with both of these, however, is a bit unusual.

The plant spreads its green leaves through the summer and fall, building up its long root – and then, if you’re using it for salad, you chop off those leaves and throw them in the compost, or give them to livestock. You read that rightly – the summer leaves are bitter and not for eating, but the winter leaves are.

Dig up the root, put it in a pot and bring it inside – or at least into the shed or greenhouse – and put an empty flowerpot upside-down over the top to keep it dark. The plant has spent all year storing energy in the root to grow more leaves in spring, and by forcing it to grow back away from light, you get crops of white and only slightly bitter leaves through the winter.

In this way, chicory gives you fresh leaves and vitamins even through the coldest winters, without any refrigeration or preservation methods.

Ideally the plant should grow a neat bulb of white leaves like lettuce, but admittedly ours grew something that looked more like Einstein’s hair. It was nonetheless good to eat, either alone or in a mix of shredded carrots, beetroot and scallions.

We sowed our chicory in spring in loose garden soil, in the sunniest area we could find. Many gardening books recommend spacing them up to half a metre apart, as they grow quite large; we planted them closely together, but then had to transplant some of the seedlings to spread them out as the plants grew and spread.

Tricks like this are important for keeping fresh vitamins through the winter months. Before refrigeration was widespread, people had to find ways of getting nutrition through the winter. Animals can be overwintered, meat can salted, pickled and smoked and last for months. Beans and cereals can be dried and last for many years. Vitamins, found in fresh plants and lasting only a short time in the body, present more of a problem.

Luckily, there are several ways to get fresh vitamins all through the winter – keep fruits and vegetables fresh long enough to eat, mainly by preserving them in a medium in which fungus, insects and harmful bacteria don’t want to live.

You can keep some fruit and vegetables in a brine, away from oxygen, like salt pickles or sauerkraut. You can preserve others in an acid solution like vinegar, like chutneys, or juice in alcohol to make wine.

You can preserve fruit or vegetables in a high-sugar solution, as syrup or – with pectin to firm up the consistency – jam. You can trick vegetables into thinking it’s still alive, by keeping root vegetables in sand.

Chicory, however, allows you to harvest salad straight from the closet. The only thing I would caution people to do is to check it every day and not forget about it, in case rot sets in.

The roots of chicory also make a good coffee substitute, or an addition to your coffee. I washed and removed the skin from the roots I had, chopped them into pieces about a centimetre cubed, and roasted them in the oven at 160 degrees Centigrade for about 45 minutes, and then I ground them into powder. I let them steep longer than I would coffee – for about three minutes – but I like my coffee strong and dark.

I’ve seen recipes that recommend higher temperatures for shorter times – say, 180 degrees for half an hour – but I haven’t done a lot of side-by-side comparisons to explore the best approach, and of course every oven is different, and people like their coffee darker or lighter.

My recommendation is to try it at the lower temperature for at least half an hour and keep checking to see when your chicory cubes turn dark brown and hard enough to barely give when you squeeze them.

In this time of year, when gardeners are planning next year’s garden, think about trying chicory, if you have the space and want to experiment. Many gardeners in Ireland grow only a few crops every year, and many gardens could benefit from trying something new.