Licorice naked – licorice naked (harvesting and storage)

Name: Licorice naked – licorice naked (harvesting and storage)

Licorice naked – Glycyrrhyza glabra L. Ukrainian name – licorice goal, popular names – solodets, licorice, licorice root. 

The legume family is Fabaceae (Leguminosae).

For therapeutic purposes, unpeeled and peeled roots are used.

It occurs in Ukraine mainly on the coast of the Azov and Black Seas and very rarely on the Donetsk Ridge and the southern spurs of the Central Russian Upland (Donetsk and Voroshilovgrad regions). Grows on seaside shells, sands, salt marshes, clay slopes.

Usually, as a result of vegetative propagation, it forms small groups. Very rarely the area of ​​thickets reaches several hectares.

Stocks of raw materials are small. Several centners of roots can be harvested annually, mainly in the Donetsk and Zaporozhye regions, and they are rapidly decreasing.

The plant is included in the “Red Book” of the Soviet Union.

Licorice naked is a perennial herbaceous plant with a thick, short multi-headed rhizome and horizontal stolons and vertical roots extending from it. Several stems. They are vertical, up to 50-120 cm tall, branched. The whole plant is glandular-hairy. The leaves are alternate, pinnate, with 9-17 oval or elongated, ovate, entire leaflets with a point at the apex, on short petioles. Flowers in the axils of pointed bracts on short peduncles collected in inflorescences of the brush. Corolla whitish-lilac, up to 10 mm long. The fruits are elongated, bare beans, 1.5-3 cm long with 2-6 seeds. Blooms in June – July. The fruits ripen in August-September.

The roots are harvested in autumn (September-October) or early spring at the beginning of regrowth (April). They dig them out with shovels, and when they stand thickly, they plow them out with plows. The earth is shaken from the roots, the aerial parts are cut off with knives and folded into loose long piles. Turn them over several times to speed up drying. To get peeled roots, after drying with sharp knives, remove the bark and put them in small piles in the sun to dry. After drying, the roots are sorted, discarding flabby, darkened and rotten at a break.

According to GF-X Art. 573, OST NKVT 5993/36 raw material consists of cylindrical underground shoots and peeled or not peeled roots 7-50 cm long, sometimes passing at the top into a rounded rhizome 15 cm thick. Shoots and roots are covered with thin cork bark. Outside color grayish white, inside light gray. There is no smell. The taste is sweet, characteristic, slightly irritating. Humidity is not higher than 14%.

The total ash content should not exceed 8% in unpeeled roots, 6% in purified ones, and ash insoluble in 10% hydrochloric acid, 2.5% in untreated ones, and 1% in peeled ones. Roots must contain at least 25% extractives extracted by water.

Dry roots are packed, pressed, in bales without sheathing of 140 and 175 kg, covered with iron hoops. Store in dry, well-ventilated areas. Storage period up to 10 years. Raw materials are not subject to re-control.

The roots contain 23% saponin glycyrrhizin, flavonoids, glycosides: liquiriton, liquiritoside, etc. (within 27 items).

Infusion, syrup, thick and dry extracts, liquiriton (tablets) are used as an emollient, anti-inflammatory, wound healing and mild laxative for gastrointestinal diseases, bronchial asthma, laryngitis. Included in the complex licorice powder, breast elixir, diuretic, breast, anti-hemorrhoid and laxative collections. Widely used in food industry, machinery and exported.

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