Five Things to do with Beet Thinnings

Young beet leaves, various lettuce varieties, and baby chard

The fall beets that we planted are growing every day, and the time for thinning has arrived.

If you want your beets to make big, juicy roots, thinning is critical. This is because beet seeds, which look like little asteroids, are actually seed clusters of several seeds fused together. If all or most of the seeds in the cluster germinate, you'll end up with a little clump of beet plants growing closely together everywhere that you planted one seed. This is all well and good for the beet plants--the plants will survive just fine growing in little clumps, but it is not so good for those of us who want to eat beet roots. The roots of all of the plants in the cluster would compete for nutrients and space without thinning.

Some say you can break up the beet seed clusters by rolling them with a rolling pin before planting, but I prefer to just plant them and thin.

Even though I have grown vegetables for many years, I still experience a twinge of sadness pulling a tiny, plucky, baby vegetable seedling up by the roots and tossing it in the compost pile. So whenever possible, I try to come up with ways to use the thinnings.

Here are my suggestions for ways to use your beet thinnings so that you can avoid that twinge --and because it really is a shame to waste even a few sweet, young, nutritious greens!

1. Mix them in with salads. Young beet greens, or "beet reds" as a friend of mine calls them, add beautiful color to spring and fall salads (see photo above).

2. Add them to pestos. Raw beet greens add gorgeous color and nutrition to pestos made with basil or other greens. Just throw them in the food processor with the other greens of your choice, lemon juice, olive oil, and nuts or seeds. For more on making pesto out of leaves other than basil, see my previous post on pesto.

3. Throw them in the skillet with your cooked greens. Add beet thinnings to kale, collards, or chard and steam or saute with a little vinegar, lemon juice, or tamari.

4. Ferment them. Add young beet leaves to the mix when you make sauerkraut or kimchee.

5. Juice them. Beet tops of any age can be juiced with other veggies. My favorite juice combination is beets, beet greens, carrots, ginger, and apples.

*Extra Credit*
For hardcore beetgreen lovers only:
My favorite recent discovery in the world of beet-thinnings is eating them just straight up, raw, dipped in plain yogurt. This way you really get to taste the flavor, and the creamy tartness of the yogurt is a fabulous foil for the strong, slightly bitter, buttery-crisp beet leaves.

Let me know if you have other uses for young beet greens...we have a lot of thinnings to find uses for these days!

Fall Beets

We just came in from planting a new bed in beets--3 heirloom varieties for late fall/early winter harvest.

We planted Chioggia (top photo), Bulls Blood (middle), and Detroit Dark Red (lower) beets in a raised bed amended with composted cow manure. We're hoping to harvest them before the ground freezes.

There's a lot of good info out there about fall gardening.

The image above of Chioggias is from a good article about Fall gardening in The Paper of Record, published a few years ago.

Here's some specific info on beets from Yardener:

"Beets will remain tasty and harvestable right up until the soil freezes hard which is usually 6 to 10 weeks after that first frost. Calculate when you think you will have the ground freezing hard, and back off 60 or 65 days for the date of the last fall succession planting of beets. Then move back another 3 weeks, and again another 3 weeks for the first planting of fall beets."

Beet greens are one of my staple foods. I also love raw grated beet roots as a topping for rice dishes and salads, and fermented beets are pretty fabulous too. Beets are an antioxidant-packed superfood; more here.

I cannot end this post any other way: the beet goes on.

Pesto, pesto, rah rah rah

On the lookout for ways to preserve food as the tidal wave of vegetables continues, I was inspired this morning by Jeff Ashton's musings on pesto in his book The 12- Month Gardener.

Jeff lives somewhere around here and I've taken his classes at the Organic Growers School. I credit him with a lot of what I know about raised beds and season extension. Christopher recently invested in a used copy of the The 12- Month Gardener to help with planning our fall garden, and as I was skimming around in it I noticed an interesting sidebar about making pesto out of unconventional vegetables. At the mention of beet greens, my eyes lit up.

We grew "Bulls Blood" beets this year, a heirloom variety with a deep, dark red leafy top. I love to eat the luscious red leaves, which seem just packed with pure vegetable nutrition and taste strong and hearty. But lately I can't eat them fast enough to keep up with the garden. I'm fermenting the beet roots, but I'd been wondering how to put away the greens without cooking the good nutritional juju out of them. Aha! Beet green pesto preserves the greens raw, with all of the nutritional value intact, and the fact that the leaves are all holey and not aesthetically pleasing after a season of insect snacking doesn't matter after they are food-processed into pestodom.

My previous pesto-making endeavors have been limited to variations on the traditional basil standard. But after the Jeff Ashton tip and on the heels of savoring the purslane pesto that Alan made last week I leapt with gusto into the world of unconventional pestos.

I made 4 different batches one morning last week -- 3 with various combinations of sorrel, beet greens, and Magenta Spreen lambsquarters (above is one gorgeous volunteer plant in the garden, re-seeded from last year) and 1 with a bunch of "sundried" tomatoes from our dehydrating adventures and basil from the garden.

My tasters tell me that the sundried tomato/basil one is the best, but I am partial to a pink pesto that's heavy on the dark red beet greens and bright pink lambsquarters.

Here's an approximate recipe:

• Beet leaves/tops
• Lambsquarters (wild green or cultivated Magenta Spreen)
• French sorrel
• Flat leaf parsley
• Sunflower seeds
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Peeled garlic cloves
• Lemon juice
• A little water if necessary to make the food processor swirl

These can be combined in an almost infinite variety of proportions. I used somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 cup of sunflower seeds, 1/2 cup olive oil and 1/4 cup lemon juice for every batch, along with 5 or 6 cloves of garlic and greens to fill up the rest of the food processor. You can skip the lemon juice if you add a lot of sorrel, since it's super lemony.

Which reminds me to sing the praises of sorrel. It's perennial. It's easy. It's très gourmet. It's beautiful in the garden from the time it first appears in the spring to its tall, flowering peak. And it tastes so good! I can't say enough good things about it, really. Sorrel, how do I love you? Let me count the ways. I like it in salads, as a cooked green, in soups, and today I learned it's fabulous in pesto too.

Here's some in our garden (above).

In any case, viva el pesto!