Beet harvest

It’s been so hot, I’ve been putting this task off. It’s not a chore though, because if there is one single food that we both LOVE from the garden, it’s beets. They are totally worth canning. So today was the day to pull them out so we can start to put some of the garden beds to bed for the end of season.

Unfortunately, when planting the beets I forgot the first rule of Beet Club - do NOT plant them in the pre-holed landscape fabric. This should be fairly obvious once you’ve done it once, or even twice. But apparently I forgot all about that in the fervor of spring planting. That mean the first thing I had to do was remove the landscape fabric, pulling it over the beet leaves one beet at a time. Duh!

Here is the beet bed before and after harvest:

I planted two primary kinds of beets, and had a few old golden beet seeds, which you will see I added late and didn’t thin, so there were only a few smaller beets from those.

When they were all cleaned up, they made a formidable display. Trigger alert for my mother, who does not like non-standard-colored vegetables.

Tex and the other goats (and the chickens, too) loved the beet top treat.

I roasted up the little golden beets with some EVOO and S/P for my afternoon snack and dinner, yum!

The red and white chioggia beets were boiled, skinned, sliced, brined, and water bath canned for later. The colors are crazy, probably even lighter than usual because they were a little late to harvest.

I had a few chioggia leftover, so I cut them into matchbook shapes, and Steve loaded them in the freeze dryer. I love crunchy beets on my salads.

I ran out of steam before processing the dark red Detroit beets. They will probably be boiled, diced into small cubes, and canned in brine in larger jars - tomorrow! For now they will just wait patiently in the fridge.