Cottage Garden Flowering Chicory Seeds

Cottage Garden Blue Chicory Seed

Chicory Intubus is the parent native variety of Chicory from which multiple cultivated vegetable crops were developed. Chicory forms a deep tap root that has been used as a coffee substitute. However the principal reason for growing this variety is for the mass of powder blue flowers held at 2-3 feet that open each morning and close by the afternoon. A fresh crop of flowers opens the following day, and the plants flower throughout July and early August.

The powder blue flower colour is quite unusual in herbaceous borders in late summer and even a single chicory plant will make a visual focal point of interest.

Chicory can be grown as an annual, but the plant is a short-lived perennial, most flowering for 2-3 years before losing vigour or succumbing to winter frost and rot.

Why Grow Chicory as a border flower?

• 🏡 Ideal for Mixed Cottage Gardens – Producing a mound of dandilion like leaves followed by upright seethrough stems peppered with flowers.

•  A traditional heirloom cottage garden flower, perfect for rustic mixed self-seeding and replicating cottage gardens.
  

• Provides a rare pop of blue in the late summer border.

Growing Information:

• 🌱 Sow: In late spring by scattering the seeds in their final flowering position. Alternatively, in seed compost and transplant to growing position when the plants are at the 6 leaf stage before the full tap root develops.

• ☀️ Position: Ideal full sun, or mixed border and tolerates very poor and gravel-filled soils

• 📏 Spacing: mature plants can form crowns 8-12-inches across  and will send up 4-8 stems. Grow as single plants, Chicory grows well in gravel but is too top heavy for all but the largest pots.

• 🌾 Harvest: collect seed from totally brown seed heads in Autumn and store for sowing the following spring.