Useful information

Slime onions: useful properties and cultivation

Perennial bows are of considerable interest to gardeners. They are hardy, with good care they grow in one place for five years or more, they give excellent vitamin greens earlier than onions.

This group of rare bows is quite numerous. These include anzur, sweet onions, slime onions, chives, wild garlic, etc. Their agricultural technology has a lot in common. For their cultivation, it is necessary to allocate a small area somewhere on the edge of the garden, so that they do not interfere with the main cultivation of the soil, in a well-lit place. In culture, they are very undemanding, they can not tolerate only very acidic soil.

Read articles The variety of vegetable onions and their use,

Growing wild garlic from seeds and bulbs,

Onion-anzur - the secrets of growing.

By cultivating various types of perennial onions on the garden plot, you can get a rich vitamin product from early spring to late autumn, and when grown indoors - throughout the winter period.

Each of these bows are good in their own way. But all of them are a source of vitamins, phytoncides and biologically active substances. Therefore, you need to choose the bows you like and breed them on your site. And today we will talk about one of the most useful perennial onions - slime.

Slime onion (glandular, drooping, mangyr) received such a strange name because when cutting off its leaves, drops of liquid are released, very reminiscent of tears. In the wild, it is found in the steppes, on meadow and stony soils of Western and Eastern Siberia.

It has a nutritional advantage that is rare for onions - it contains few essential oils, therefore it is devoid of bitterness and has a mild taste. In addition, it is valued for its high medicinal, decorative and melliferous properties.

The leaves of the slime onion have the richest chemical composition. They contain from 50 to 75 mg% vitamin C, up to 2.5 mg% carotene, highly active phytoncides, salts of zinc, nickel, manganese, and molybdenum necessary for humans. But the onion is especially rich in iron salts, due to which it is especially useful in the treatment of blood diseases, incl. and with anemia.

Slime onion has a nutritional property that is rare for all types of onions - it contains few essential oils, so it is devoid of bitterness and has a mild taste and garlic smell. The leaves of this onion are eaten with pleasure by children. The obvious advantages of this onion include the fact that it is able to maintain its freshness and juiciness for up to seven days.

Slime onion is a squat plant with thick, succulent leaves of a linear type, growing well in the northernmost regions. Unlike other types of onions, it produces not tubular, but flat (like garlic) juicy leaves with a slight garlic smell. These leaves are very brittle, up to 25-30 cm long and up to 2-2.5 cm wide, with rounded blunt ends, covered with a thick waxy coating, collected in a lush basal rosette.

The leaves are very juicy and fragile, when they break, they abundantly secrete thick juice. The leaf blades are curved in a spiral, which gives them vertical stability. In appearance, the slime onion is very similar to the sweet onion, but its leaves are wider and thicker. In the first year, by the end of the growing season, 2 shoots with 4-5 leaves are formed on the plants. In the future, their number is constantly increasing, and in the fourth or fifth year on the bush usually has up to 28-30 shoots. After five to six years, the shoot formation process is reduced, the plants grow old.

A characteristic feature of the slime is the regrowth of young leaves during the entire growing season, since it does not have a dormant period. Immediately after the snow melts, the growth of last year's pale leaves with a low content of chlorophyll resumes, and then young leaves appear. And the formation and growth of new leaves ends in late autumn, with the onset of stable frosty weather.

Another feature is that its leaves retain high taste and do not coarse until late autumn. They are good at cutting even at the end of summer, when there is a strong lack of green onions. And the third feature of the slime is that this plant is very resistant to diseases.

The root system of the slime onion is highly developed. The rhizome is 1.5–2 cm thick, located in the soil at a depth of 3–5 cm. The slime does not have a real bulb. Small false bulbs grow from the rhizome (small cylindrical thickenings). In the initial growing season, they have juicy scales. By the end of the period, the upper scales dry out. New young “bulbs” gradually grow in radial circles up to 25–30 cm in diameter around the central “onion”.

The arrow of this onion is without a cavity, drooping before the inflorescence blooms (hence one of the names of this type of onion).

From the bottom side of the bottom and from the rhizome there are numerous, strongly intertwined roots, some of which penetrate to a depth of 60 cm. In the second year of life, the plants form flowering shoots. They are tall (up to 50-60 cm), thick, rough and not edible. The flowers of this onion are light lilac with a pink tint. Inflorescence - an umbrella, consisting of 80-100 flowers.

Agrotechnics of onion-slime

This type of onion grows in any fertile soil with good moisture.

The plant propagates both by seeds and by dividing the bush. Sowing and planting is carried out from late April to mid-July. Later sowing dates are not suitable for this crop, as the onions must grow and accumulate sufficient nutrients for a successful overwintering. It is sown on ridges or on a flat surface with three-, four-line ribbons, the distance between which is 50 cm, between the lines - 25-30 cm. Seedlings appear 20-30 days after sowing.

Slime onions are also planted in separate bushes. Bushes are dug up from a two-, three-year-old plantation and divided into bulbs. One bush gives from 15 to 30 or more bulbs, which are planted in single-row rows at a distance of 50 cm, in a row - 20 cm.

Onion care consists in systematic loosening, weeding, watering and feeding. Since perennial onions cannot compete with perennial weeds, the beds for sowing perennial onions for growing in one place must be completely free of weeds. This must be carefully monitored, destroying the emerging weeds in time.

Onions are cut up to five times per season. The first cut is carried out as soon as 5-6 green feathers grow on the onion. After that, it is necessary to carry out nitrogen fertilization, preferably organic. Cutting the feathers is done as needed throughout the first half of summer as the leaves reach a length of 30 cm.Do not allow the leaves to overgrow and become rough. Then the onion will bloom, during this period it needs to be given a complex mineral dressing. A month before the onset of frost, the slime onion must be fed with phosphorus and potassium for better wintering, if it is grown in a perennial culture. As a rule, from three to five kilograms of the crop are harvested from one square meter. Only one cleaning is carried out in the fall. At the end of October, all remaining leaves and arrows are cut off and the aisles are processed.

With a late sowing - in July - by autumn the onion will have 4-5 leaves. It is cleaned in the spring. You can only cut off the feather, leaving the onion to grow in a perennial culture, or you can take out the aerial part along with the roots, and plant later crops in this garden in July, for example, radishes, spinach, dill, which still have time to yield a harvest.

When growing this onion in an annual culture, it is better to sow it on seedlings at the beginning of April, and then transplant it into a garden bed that is free after growing lettuce or radish at the age when it has 3-4 true leaves. It is better to do this with a "bouquet", that is, 3-4 plants per hole at once according to the scheme of 30x30 cm.In this case, the onion harvest can be obtained 1.5 months after planting the seedlings on the garden bed, and it will still be possible to re-grow radishes or dill on this garden bed after harvesting the onions.

For forcing feathers in greenhouses and greenhouses, onions are dug out from autumn and stored in piles near the greenhouse.

Slime onions are frost-resistant, young shoots tolerate temperatures up to -6 degrees.

Based on materials from the newspaper "Ural Gardener", No. 31, 2014

Copyright en.greenchainge.com 2024

$config[zx-auto] not found$config[zx-overlay] not found