Early Summer Harvest: Beets!

It's been a sunny June in the Northwest, and beets are popping up everywhere — on restaurant menus, at farmers markets, and hopefully in your garden! Carla Emery shares tips on canning and preparing, and a few recipes for enjoying your beets. 

Canning: First scrub roots very well. Then precook by either baking or boiling because raw-packing is not recommended for beets.

• Precooking by Baking. Cut off tops and roots. You can put beets of any size together in the oven (conventional or microwave). They're all cooked when the biggest one is done. Then pour cold water over the hot, roasted beets, and you'll be able to slip off their skins. Dump the water.

• Precooking by Boiling. Remove the entire beet top except for the closest 1-2 inches of stem. Leave the roots on; that keeps them from "bleeding" (losing nutrients). Sort beets according to size, and boil similar sizes together so they'll get done at about the same time. When fork-tender (in about 30 minutes), move them into cold water. Slip off skins, stems, and roots.

• Cutting Up. You cut up beets to improve and even out heat penetration in your jar. If baby beets are smaller than 2 inches wide, they can be left whole. If they're larger, cut them into 1⁄2 - inch cubes. Or slice 1⁄2 inch thick, and then quarter the slices.

• Packing and Processing. Pack beets into hot jars. Cover with boiling water, leaving 1⁄2 inch headspace. Optional: Add 1⁄2 t. salt/pt., 1 t. salt/qt.; add 1 T. vinegar/pt., 2 T./qt. to preserve color. Process in a pressure canner only: pints for 30 minutes, quarts for 35 minutes. If using a weighted-gauge canner, set at 10 lb. pressure at 0-1,000 feet above sea level; set at 15 lb. at higher altitudes. If using a dial-gauge canner, set at 11 lb. pressure at 0-2,000 feet above sea level; 12 lb. at 2,001-4,000 feet; 13 lb. at 4,001-6,000 feet; 14 lb. at 6,001-8,000 feet; or 15 lb. above 8,000 feet.

Pickled Beets: Start by carefully scrubbing 7 lb. of beets (2 to 2 1⁄2 inches in diameter) to remove all dirt. Now trim off beet tops, leaving on 1 inch of stem and roots to prevent nutrient loss. Wash well. Sort by size. Cover size-grouped  beets with boiling water and cook until tender (25 to 30 minutes). Drain and discard liquid. Cool beets. Trim off roots and stems and slip off skins. Slice into 1⁄4 - inch slices. Peel and thinly slice.

Combine 4 c. vinegar (5 percent), 1 1⁄2 t. canning or  pickling salt, 2 c. sugar, and 2 c. water. Put 2 cinnamon sticks and 12 whole cloves in a cheesecloth bag and add to vinegar mixture. Bring to a boil.

Add beets and 4 to 6 onions (2 to 2 1⁄2 inches in diameter). Simmer 5 minutes. Remove spice bag. Fill pint or quart jars with hot beets and onions, leaving 1⁄2 inch headspace. Adjust lids. Process either pints or quarts in boiling-water canner. At up to 1,000 feet above sea level, process 30 minutes; at 1,001–3,000 feet, 35 minutes; 3,001–6,000 feet,  40 minutes; and above 6,000 feet, 45 minutes.

Pickled Whole Baby Beets Follow above directions, but use beets that are 1 to 1 1⁄2 inches in diameter. Pack whole; don’t slice. You can leave out the onions.

Preparing

Eating Baby Beets. Thinning beets has a really good side. You can eat the thinnings. Eat the tops like greens. If they're big enough to have roots of any development, eat both tops and roots together. I boil top greens and bottom root with bacon and add butter at serving time. Delicious! I like beets best of all at the "baby" stage - that's around 1 1⁄2 to 2 inches in diameter, about the size of a radish. Baby beets are also nice for eating, freezing, canning, or pickling.

Precooking Beets to Eat Fresh. Cut off tops. You may or may not leave a stub (leaving it prevents nutrient loss). Cover with boiling water, and boil until the beets are slightly soft to the touch. Another way to precook beets is to bake them in the oven. The bigger they are, the longer it takes. Drain and slip off the skins; no peeling is necessary. Cut off any remaining root tail and the stalk stub.

Recipes

Quick Beet Soup: Combine 2 c. milk, 1⁄2 c. beet juice, and seasonings.

Cold Beet Salad: Cook 1 lb. beets until tender. Cool, peel, and slice thinly. Combine 4 T. vinegar, 4 T. water, 1⁄2 t. sugar, 2 1⁄2 t. caraway seeds, 1 chopped small onion, 1 t. ground cloves, 1 bay leaf, salt, pepper, and 4 T. oil. Pour over  beets and let marinate several hours before serving.

Orange/Beet Juice: From Ruth of Bonaire: "Make fresh orange juice - enough to fill the blender two-thirds full. Then add 1⁄4 c. peeled, cubed raw beet. Blend and then pour through a strainer, a bit at a time, mashing pulp with a spoon to extract the maximum amount of juice. You can eat the pulp-it's sweet! This juice looks and tastes like red Kool-Aid!"


NOTE: Fresh garden beets have more color than most digestive systems can absorb, so your resulting bowel movement may appear to have “blood” in it. That’s just beet color. Eating beets is absolutely not harmful — on the contrary, beets are very nourishing. And they’re not harsh to digest, only startling to view in that manner.

Secrets of Getting the Most from a Small Garden

Knox Cellars is dedicated to discovering how to do intensive gardening on city lots. They grow dozens of fruit trees by the espalier method and pollinate them with their own colonies of Orchard Mason bees. Their website, www.knoxcellars.com, features the most recent issue and several back issues of Urban Farmer. Most people pay their way onto the mailing list by buying something from them: bees, a book, or audiotape. They write an Urban Farmer from time to time, when the mood strikes, sharing interesting things they have learned about bees, bugs, or gardening.

1. Make use of semi-shaded areas unsuitable for tomatoes or root vegetables by growing leafy vegetables like lettuce, chard, mustard, or endive there.
2. Don't over plant herbs. Two parsley or chive plants can quite likely produce all you need unless your family is large.
3. Avoid sprawling varieties. You can plant 6 rows of carrots, beets, or onions in the same square footage that one row of squash would take because squash simply will spread out all over the place, but root vegetables don't. So limit or refuse summer squash, winter squash, cucumbers, watermelons, muskmelons, cantaloupes, and corn, because they take more space than they're worth. Or use the recently developed compact "bush" kinds of melons, squash, cucumbers, and pumpkins.
4. Consider interplanting so that fast-maturing vegetables use the space between slower-maturing ones that will later spread; for instance, plant radishes or lettuce between vine plants like squash or pumpkin. They mature so fast that you get a crop before the vines need that space.
5. Give preference to continuously bearing vegetables; for instance, choose chard over spinach, because spinach has a brief period of productivity but then is done for the whole summer. Chard will keep making harvest for you until frost kills it. Other continuous bearers are tomatoes, broccoli, kale, lima beans, squash of all sorts, eggplant, peppers, cucumbers, chard, and brussels sprouts.
6.  Use wide-row and succession planting methods to give you the most vegetable productivity per square foot. For instance, peas have a relatively brief production season, but they produce heavily while they are at it, and then you can till up the ground they were in and plant something else. Succession planting works best with a long growing season, but in most places peas, lettuce, radishes, beets, and carrots mature quickly enough that you have time for a second crop if you plant as soon as the first is harvested.
7. Harvest daily in season. Broccoli, cucumbers, summer squash, beans, and chard, for example, will stop producing if they aren't harvested. But if you keep them faithfully and regularly harvested, then they keep producing and you maximize their production.
8. Encourage your garden to grow up rather than across: Try climbing beans (pole or runners) or cucumbers trained to grow up something. Use a big vine such as runner beans, kiwi, or grapes to screen out an ugly area, make shade, or hang from a basket.
9. Plant tall crops such as corn or sunflowers on the north end of the garden so they don't shade other plants.
10.  Practice deep watering; it allows you to plant closer together because the roots will go down instead of spreading sideways.

[Excerpt from The Encyclopedia of Country Living, Chapter 2: Introduction to Plants.  Other topics include Laying Out the Garden, USDA Plant Hardiness Zones, and Garden & Farm Philosophies.]

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Secrets of Getting the Most from a Small Garden

Although I grew up ten minutes from Seattle, I was fortunate enough that my parents had about four acres of land to plant and garden, not to mention the plant nursery next door and tracts of undeveloped land. We had space enough (and irrigation enough) that our only concern for planting was the sunlight needs of the plants. A patch of corn would easily be moved to the other end of the property the following season if it needed more light, the rabbit hutches were displaced by plum trees if needed, and we lost track of all the blackberries, apples, and strawberries that grew wild in neglected parts of the property.

Now, I have twenty square feet to grow a garden, half of it heavily shaded and a good portion on a street, and for the first time in the Northwest, I have run out of space. Luckily, Carla Emery knows how to get a small plot to produce to the maximum it can:

1. Make use of semishaded areas unsuitable for tomatoes or root vegetables by growing leafy vegetables like lettuce, chard, mustard, or endive there.

2. Don't overplant herbs. Two parsley or chive plants can quite likely produce all you need unless your family is large.

3. Avoid sprawling varieties. You can plant 6 rows of carrots, beets, or onions in the same square footage that one row of squash would take because squash simply will spread out all over the place, but root vegetables don't. So limit or refuse summer squash, winter squash, cucumbers, watermelons, muskmelons, cantaloupes, and corn, because they take more space than they're worth. Or use the recently developed compact "bush" kinds of melons, squash, cucumbers, and and pumpkins.

4. Consider interplanting so that fast-maturing vegetables use the space between slower-maturing ones that will later spread; for instance, plant radishes or lettuce between vine plants like squash or pumpkin. They mature so fast that you get a crop before the vines need that space.

5. Give preference to continuously bearing vegetables; for instance, choose chard over spinach, because spinach has a brief period of productivity but then is done for the whole summer. Chard will keep making harvest for you until frost kills it. Other continuous bearers are tomatoes, broccoli, kale, lima beans, squash of allsorts, eggplant, peppers, cucumbers, chard, and Brussels sprouts.

6. Use wide-row and succession planting methods to give you the most vegetable productivity per square foot. For instance, peas have a relatively brief production season, but they produce heavily while they are at it, and then you can till up the ground they were in and plant something else. Succession planting works best with a long growing season, but in most places peas, lettuce, radishes, beets, and carrots mature quickly enough that you have time for a second crop if you plant as soon as the first is harvested.

7. Harvest daily in season. Broccoli, cucumbers, summer squash, beans, and chard, for example, will stop producing if they aren't harvested. But if you keep them faithfully and regularly harvested, then they keep producing and you maximize their production.

8. Encourage your garden to grow up rather than across: Try climbing beans (pole or runners) or cucumber strained to grow up something. Use a big vine such as runner beans, kiwi, or grapes to screen out an ugly area, make shade, or hang from a basket.

9. Plant tall crops such as corn or sunflowers on the north end of the garden so they don't shade other plants.

10. Practice deep watering; it allows you to plant closer together because the roots will go down instead of spreading sideways.

Small Gardens, Big Potential

Sad to say, the lawn size of the average American home seems to be steadily shrinking by the year. I can fondly recall how the backyard of my first childhood house, hardly a palatial estate, was still spacious enough to accommodate a pretty decent doubles volleyball match, not to mention the giant igloo my brothers put together during the heavy Seattle snowfall of 1990. Along the sides of the yard, my grandfather, a natural gardener, planted fruit trees, garlic, lettuce, and fragrant sesame that he’d harvest year after year to use in our kitchen and send along as gifts to our friends down the street.

My parents’ current house in the suburbs east of Lake Washington possesses many of the accoutrements popular with modern homeowners—e.g., granite-top counters, hardwood floors, a roaring fire at the flip of a switch—but alas, volleyball games are a thing of the past, and any attempts to insert a fruit and vegetable garden onto the property will take a good deal of creativity. The problem is compounded for the thousands of city dwellers who yearn for homegrown goodies of their very own but despair of ever finding ample space for them on their tiny urban plots.

If either of these scenarios sounds familiar to you, here’s cause for hope: with a little bit of well-informed planting and care, even a small patch of earth is capable of sprouting forth a surprisingly substantial quantity and variety of produce. So take in the following suggestions, stop despairing, and start planting!

1. Make use of semishaded areas unsuitable for tomatoes or root vegetables by growing leafy vegetables like lettuce, chard, mustard, or endive there.

2. Don’t overplant herbs. Two parsley or chive plants can quite likely produce all you need unless your family is large.

3. Avoid sprawling varieties. You can plant six rows of carrots, beets, or onions in the same square footage that one row of squash would take because squash simply will spread out all over the place, but root vegetables don’t. So limit or refuse summer squash, winter squash, cucumbers, watermelons, muskmelons, cantaloupes, and corn, because they take more space than they’re worth. Or use the recently developed compact “bush” kinds of melons, squash, cucumbers, and pumpkins.

4. Consider interplanting so that fast-maturing vegetables use the space between slower-maturing ones that will later spread; for instance, plant radishes or lettuce between vine plants like squash or pumpkin. They mature so fast that you get a crop before the vines need that space.

5. Give preference to continually bearing vegetables; for instance, choose chard over spinach, because spinach has a brief period of productivity but then is done for the whole summer. Chard will keep making harvest for you until frost kills it. Other continual bearers are tomatoes, broccoli, kale, lima beans, squash of all sorts, eggplants, peppers, cucumbers, chard, and Brussels sprouts.

6. Use wide-row and succession planting methods to give you the most vegetable productivity per square foot. For instance, peas have a relatively brief production season, but they produce heavily while they are at it, and then you can till up the ground they were in and plant something else. Succession planting works best with a long growing season, but in most places peas, lettuce, radishes, beets, and carrots mature quickly enough that you have time for a second crop if you plant as soon as the first is harvested.

7. Harvest daily in season. Broccoli, cucumbers, summer squash, beans, and chard, for example, will stop producing if they aren’t harvested. But if you keep them faithfully and regularly harvested, then they keep producing and you maximize their production.

8. Encourage your garden to grow up rather than across: Try climbing beans (poles or runners) or cucumbers trained to grow up something. Use a big vine such as runner beans, kiwi, or grapes to screen out an ugly area, make shade, or hang from a basket.

9. Plant tall crops such as corn or sunflowers on the north end of the garden so they don’t shade other plants.

10. Practice deep watering; it allows you to plant closer together because the roots will go down instead of spreading sideways.