Harvesting Fall Beets

As I’m getting ready to plan out this year’s vegetables, I know I want to include beets.  Again.

I thought I had planted beets last spring for the first time ever, but somewhere along the growing season I forgot, or thought they never came up.  All summer I thought I had grown 2 plots of swiss chard, which actually amounted to a lot of swiss chard.  We just ate them all, never noticing any difference.  When I decided the gardens were done for the season and it was time to harvest whatever was left, out came what I had thought was the swiss chard.  But, lo and behold, there were beets attached to a whole bunch of them.

Ok, time to think about that.  It was then I realized these were the beets I had planted.  The same ones that that hadn’t ever grown, and mysteriously turned into swiss chard.

Now this was exciting.  I had quite a few beets from this harvest.

But, beets are not something I ever remember eating.  Maybe we had them from a can when I was a kid, but even then I’m sure I didn’t eat any.

So I headed to the web to figure out how best to cook these little garden treasures…

Since this was the first time cooking them, I kept it simple and just quartered and boiled them for about 20 minutes until they were soft.  I loved the variety of colors and patterns of the beets!  My fingers turned a bit pink too, but that’s ok.

We ate them just as they were, but I’m sure you could season them to your own taste.

I am definitely growing lots of them again this year, and marking them clearly!  And apparently beet greens taste a lot like swiss chard, so we’ll just continue to eat them as well.