Barberry Is Beautiful, Tasty And Healthy

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

From the fruits of barberry, you can make preparations for the winter in the form of jams and preserves, prepare delicious drinks and fresh juice, cook original sweet pastille or spicy seasoning for meat dishes. Gourmets will appreciate the salad with barberry leaves. Also, this plant is revered for its medicinal properties

Procurement and storage of raw materials

When you grow barberry, it means that you always have antipyretic, antimicrobial, astringent, and diaphoretic on hand. It is used in the treatment of the genitourinary system, hepatitis, and is used for rinsing when stomatitis worries.

You need to be careful with berries. Until the fruits are fully ripe, they are poisonous to humans. But this property disappears as soon as they ripen completely. Ripening occurs in September, but you can harvest at a later date. Moreover, the barberry has one interesting feature - its fruits can remain on the branches even all winter long, and will not deteriorate or fall off.

Leaves are harvested during budding, as well as during the flowering period. They are dried outdoors in a place protected from sunlight. The raw materials are laid out on a bedding in a thin layer. During the drying process, you need to choose leaves that show a brown tint or when they turn black. Only green ones are left for storage. They are put in paper bags.

They start harvesting the roots when they are at rest. This time falls in late autumn and early spring. Having taken the roots out of the soil, they are shaken off from the adhering earth and the decayed areas are immediately removed. In no case should you wash the collected raw materials, since the berberine contained in the roots is simply washed out when the raw materials are processed with water.

The roots are left to dry in a dark, warm room. It can be placed next to a heat source, but so that the temperature does not exceed + 50 ° С. Store in bags.

Reproduction of barberry

Barberry is a shrub of medium height - up to 2-2.5 m. It can be propagated in different ways: vegetatively and by seeds. From vegetative, such techniques are available as:

• division of the bush;

• transplantation of root suckers;

• rooting of green cuttings.

With these approaches, the first harvest can be counted on much faster than growing seedlings for seedlings from seed.

The place for the planting hole should be chosen based on what result you intend to get in the end: to harvest the fruits or you will need healing roots. In order for the bush to bear fruit generously, it is planted in a sunny place. For the development of the root system, you can set aside a place for barberry in a shady corner of the garden.

Barberry prefers neutral or slightly alkaline soils. A planting hole is made up to 40 cm deep, with a diameter of about 0.4 m. If you want to plant several plants in a row, leave a distance of about 1.5 m between them. After planting, do not forget to water the young bush and mulch the soil around it.

The optimal season for sowing seeds is autumn. To collect seed from fresh fruits, juice is first squeezed out of them, then rubbed through a sieve. The resulting mass with seeds is washed with water, and then left to dry.

For sowing, a place well-lit by the sun's rays is taken away. On this bed, grooves up to 1 cm deep are arranged. The seeds are placed in the grooves close to each other, at a distance of about 1.5 cm. By the summer of next year, seedlings should appear. When each seedling has 2 true leaves, the plants are thinned out, leaving only the strongest ones. There must be a distance of at least 3 cm between them.

Before transplanting to a permanent place, seedlings are grown here for two years. Caring for them consists in loosening the soil, watering and mulching. On depleted lands, fertilizing is mandatory.