Beets: The Plantening!

Beet Greens and Swiss Chard

Time for that BEETS post I promised you! Unfortunately, I don’t have as many gorgeous pictures of BEETS from my GARDEN as I have of Carrots to spice this up with.

Beets, like carrots, do well in Austin in the Winter Garden.

(There was once a place in New York City called the Wintergarden, in the early 20th and late 19th century, and it was a very popular theater and I think they served cocktails there and also had dancing and bands.)

The Winter Garden in New York City.

Anyway: My best experience with beets has been planting them directly into homemade, screened compost. Which brings us to Compost. You may have noticed that most gardeners, both of this century and the 19th and 20th, are fanatical about compost, and I am no exception. I don’t know WHAT IT IS about compost, but it is ADDICTIVE! Once you start making compost YOU CANNOT STOP, even if you DON’T HAVE A GARDEN!

What is compost? Essentially, it is homemade fertilizer made out of dead plants, kitchen waste, fallen leaves, and if you are lucky like me, sawdust. Oh, and coffee grounds and used tea leaves usually are included. There are a million (ok, hundreds) of books out there and website information about the B*E*S*T ways to make compost, but essentially compost is just throwing garbage in a pile on the ground and letting it break down into soil again. (Biodegradable garbage, that is.)

Compost can be made two ways: hot or cold. Making “hot” compost is much faster, and “cold” compost has more nutrients, but they are both fine compost. To make HOT compost, you make or buy some sort of BIN, and you put your leaves and coffee grounds and carrot peelings and dead tomato plants in it, and a little water, and you turn the bin to let oxygen in, and the process of breaking down creates HEAT. If you pay close attention to the ratio of dry, brown ingredients (called “browns” : dry leaves, sawdust. etc) and damp “Green” ingredients (called “greens” but includes cofffee grounds, grass clippings, and vegetable kitchen wastes) you can make a batch of finished “hot” compost in a relatively short time. Compost is done cooking when it smells heavenly like a forest floor.

Gigantic BEETS!

“Cold” composting takes longer, but is more suited to my laziness and busy schedule. For “cold” compost, you create an open-air bin out of old pallets, or bales of hay, or whatever is handy. Them you just throw your compost ingredients into it willy-nilly, being careful, however, to cover up delicious kitchen scraps with dirt, to discourage “wildlife”. Once your bin is full, you “turn” it by pitching it into another nearby open-air bin, and after a while you pitch it back into the original bin. It is done when it looks like dirt and smells heavenly like a forest floor.

(What is the addictive part of composting? It is saving things to compost. Once you have gotten used to setting all your compostable kitchen waste aside, you can never stop. It just seems like such a WASTE to throw things into the landfill, that could so easily be composted! To create fantastic topsoil! While all around us agribusiness is sending millions of tons of topsoil into the gulf of Mexico, guaranteeing that our grandchildren will die of starvation due to lack of sufficient topsoil in which to grow food! The impulse to compost the compostable becomes irresistable, to the extent that one starts saving orange peels in one’s pockets when away from home, and asking restaurants if you can have their coffee grounds.)

Back to BEETS: THE PLANTENING! So, prepare a wheelbarrow-loadful of screened compost (to make screened compost you force compost through a screen made of hardware cloth) and dump it on your weeded, prepared bed. Smooth out the compost and make it as level as you can without kneeling or stepping on the bed.

Then, take the beet seeds, which are GREAT seeds, very easy to see and work with, and plant them about three inches apart in rows in the soil. Plant them about a half an inch to an inch deep, and when you are done press all the dirt down and water it. Keep the bed moist with daily watering until it is full of wee seedlings.

Here is the thing about beet seeds (and swiss chard seeds too, which are practically the same thing): each seeds has FIVE seeds on it. So under perfect conditions, each seed will make five seedlings. Can you let them all live? NO. You must only allow ONE seedling to live. That’s right, MORE THINNING!!

Fresh Beets make your dinner COLORFUL

Thinning beets is MUCH easier, psychologically, than thinning carrots, however. Because you can EAT the thinned seedlings, which is 1)delicious and 2) at least they are not being killed in vain. The wee Beet seedlings are great mixed into a salad, which is what I usually do; a whole bedful of beet seedlings only makes like one salad. Or, you can cook them and eat them, they are good that way too! Lots of fancy restaurants only use the beet seedlings, they are so GOURMET.

Another great thing about beets is: beet greens. When you harvest a beet, you harvest the greens at the same time, and they are ALSO edible. I would say that they fall in the Deliciousness Spectrum in between SPINACH (the most delicious green) and Swiss Chard; they taste like swiss chard, but have the soft texture of spinach. When you harvest your beets, you can bake the beets in the oven, tossed in olive oil and salt, and quickly sautee the beet greens to be served as your second vegetable. They can be used in any recipe that calls for cooked spinach with good effect. ANd they are totally EXTRA and FREE!