Information on the Friesian plant: Tips for the culture of the Friesian plant

If you want to bring your salad garden to life, try a new green. Curly is easy enough to grow and will add a rustling texture to your beds and salad bowl. The uses of curly lettuce are typically culinary, but you can also grow these pretty heads of lettuce to decorate flower beds.

What are the Fritz Greens?

Curly lettuce is often called lettuce, but it is not really a lettuce. It is more akin to endive and chicory, but can be used as lettuce or any other green salad. Also called endive frisee, frisee grows on a head like other vegetables. The leaves are green on the outside and paler and yellower on the inside. The leaves look like ferns, with lots of forks, giving them a curly or frizzy appearance.

Curly leaves can be cooked, but are most often used raw in salads. The soft inner leaves are best eaten fresh, while the other leaves may become hard. Cooking these outer leaves can soften their texture and taste, but they may cook too quickly. Curly has a slightly bitter and pungent taste. Many people use it sparingly in salads rather than as a main ingredient.

How to grow curls

You don’t need a lot of information about frizzles to start growing this green if you have experience growing lettuce and other greens. Like other greens, frisee is a cold-climate vegetable, so plant it with your lettuce. A little fertilizer in the soil will help curly leaf grow well, and you can either plant it directly in the garden or start it indoors. As with lettuce, you can use successional planting for more continuous production.

Supply your frizzles with water continuously, without over-watering them. And, make sure to protect them from the sun. Too much sun causes the outer leaves to harden. In fact, the traditional method of curling is to bleach it. This involves covering the plants to protect them from the sun when they have reached three-quarters of their maturity. This keeps the leaves pale and particularly tender. Try growing curly grass with peppers, broccoli, eggplants and other larger plants for shade.

Fritz will be ready for harvest about eight weeks after transplanting the seedlings into the garden. Harvest as you would with lettuce, using a knife to cut the plant at the base. Use the vegetables quickly, as they will not keep for more than a few days in the refrigerator.