Making Pickled Beets

Many people - especially kids - make faces and turn up their noses when you talk about beets. Beets just aren't their favorite thing. I can understand that.  There are certain things that I'm not crazy about eating.  Turnips, for instance.  I happen to really like beets.  I like them cooked in broth.  I really like them roasted in the oven with olive oil.  But I'll show you tonight a way to prepare them that most everyone can enjoy.  Pickled beets.  My grandmother we called "Bumby" always served pickled beets as an appetizer at Sunday dinner and on special occasions.  I liked them as a kid and I still prepare and eat them pickled today.

First, you gotta pick 'em.  I grow two types of beets.  This is a bull's blood beets. The leaves look the color of bull's blood, I suppose.

Bull's Blood Beets

This is a Chioggia Beet.  It originates from Italy, and I'll show you something neat about this variety in a minute.

Chioggia Beets

I picked 10 pounds of fresh beets in a produce bucket since that's what the recipe calls for.

I brought them in and washed them to get all the dirt off of them.

Then I sliced the bottoms and tops off of them.  Chioggia on the left and Bull's Blood on the right.

Then I cut the beets all up - in chunks and slices.  Here's the neat thing I want to show you about Chioggia beets.  When you slice them, they look like a peppermint! You know, just like a starlight mint.  The others behind the "eye-catchers" you see below are the Bull's Blood beets.

If you cut the Chioggias 'long-ways' the red & white designs really stand out!

But enough about what they look like.  Let's make pickled beets, so we can talk about what they taste like.  Obviously, you'll need 10 pounds of beets.  You'll also need a couple of cups of sugar.  I used some pure cane sugar that is grown an hour south and east of here.  The recipe also calls for 1 Tablespoon of kosher salt, a quart of white vinegar and 1/4 cup of whole cloves.

A quick side-note about cloves.  I love the way they smell.  If I inhale deeply in the container of cloves, it reminds me of my childhood.  When I was a boy, my grandmother, Bumby, showed me how to make a craft with cloves.  It is a simple craft project that involves an orange and a bunch of cloves.  She had me press the pointed end of the cloves into the orange until it was pressed all the way in.  We repeated that with a bunch of cloves all over the orange until you couldn't even see the orange anymore.  It was solid cloves.  It was a sachet, I think you call it, to be placed in a closet or drawer to make everything smell nice.  Over time the orange got smaller and smaller, but it smelled GREAT!

Sorry for the diversion.  Back to making pickled beets.  Here are the ingredients ready to go.

Put the 10 pounds of cut up beets in a pot of water and bring to a boil, cooking for about 15 minutes or until they are tender.  I tested the tenderness with a fork.  When I could press the fork in easily, they are done.  Pull out 2 cups of the "beet water" to save for later.

Sterilize your jars, lids, and rings in boiling water.  In a separate pot (I made a big mess in the kitchen), add the sugar, vinegar, beet water, and salt and bring it to a boil.  While you are waiting for this to boil, fill your jars with beets.  Then pour the hot brine over the beets in the jar using a canning funnel.

Before putting the lids on, sprinkle the cloves and then seal up the jars.

Put a rack in the bottom of a stockpot so that the jars aren't touching the bottom and bring the water to a boil.  Put your jars of beets in the boiling water, making sure that the tops of the jars are covered.  When the water returns to a boil set your timer for 10 minutes as that is how long you will process them.

Pull them out and let them cool.  My pickled beets don't look traditional as the Chioggias are white and aren't the traditional deep red color, but that's okay with me.  They still taste great!

We'll snack on these before meal time and on special occasions.  Tasty pickled beets.  Nothing goes to waste.  The beet tops and peels get fed to the milk cows. They love the sweetness just like we do, I assume.  I even found an interesting use for the boiling water that I'll show you the next time I post.

Putting in the 2015 Garlic

My LSU AgCenter Vegetable Planting Guide lists the last date to plant garlic is 11/30.  With time running out, on November 28th, I checked a portion of the row that I wanted to plant garlic on and found that it had finally dried out.  I had better get started!  It was an unseasonably warm day as I got my hoe out and a bag of 4 garlic bulbs that Tricia had purchased for me at our local feed store for a whopping $1.38.

Ready to plant garlic

I sat down on a bench underneath the pear tree and began to break off the individual cloves of garlic. I leave the skins on the garlic, so this doesn't take any time at all.

Breaking apart the garlic cloves

I counted them up as I put the cloves back into the paper bag.  I counted 59 cloves. If they all produce, that will be a nice harvest, but I notice that some of the cloves are really small and a few were damaged.  I decided to plant a few of the marginal looking cloves in one hole just in case some don't sprout.

Let's go put these in the ground

I worked up the soil real to a real nice texture.  The soil had plenty of moisture but wasn't overly wet - perfect, in my opinion, for planting.  I pulled out some winter grass and clover that was growing as I raked the seedbed smooth.

Soil worked up

A friend gave me some sawdust that had composted chicken manure mixed in it, and this seemed like the perfect application to amend a little of this to the soil.  A few scoops were added on top of the freshly worked soil, and then I worked it all in, making sure it was incorporated evenly throughout.

Sawdust with composted chicken manure

Garlic should be planted 1 inch deep, with the pointy side facing up and then they should be 4 - 6 inches apart from one another.  I used a stick to make the holes the appropriate depth and distance and carefully placed a clove (or 2 damaged ones) in each hole.

"Holey" Ground

Then I used my hands to cover each hole.  Later that afternoon we got 0.2 inches of rain, and I think that was just about perfect to wake the slumbering cloves up and get them to sprout.  Once they are up and growing, we'll mulch thickly around them with hay to discourage weed growth.  Garlic don't do well with weed competition.

Cover, add water, and wait...

In 210 days the garlic should be ready to harvest.  You can go to THIS SITE and put in the number of days to maturity and it will give you the harvest date, in this case - roughly June 25th.  If the Good Lord is willing, we'll harvest some nice cloves of garlic in late June and will be able to dry them to store in our pantry.  Garlic - we love it!

"We remember the fish which we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the onions and the garlic."  Numbers 11:5

Planting Garlic

Garlic is something that we cook with a lot.  We absolutely love the flavor.  We've grown it for several years and have almost perfected growing it, but we continue to have problems with storing it due to the high humidity during the time of the harvest.  Our yield is very good, but we lose an awful lot of our garlic while trying to dry it.

We have tried to put the garlic we harvest on top of fans that continually blow air over it, but when you are blowing hot, humid air, it has little advantageous effects on drying it.  We have brought them indoors right after harvest into a less humid environment, but still have a high loss rate. But we'll keep on trying and I'll be reading lots of information and will be ready for next summer when we harvest the garlic crop we are about to put in the ground.

Tricia purchased six garlic bulbs at the local feed store.  We grow softneck garlic in the South and although they weren't labeled at the feed store, I think this is known as the Creole variety.

"Seed" Garlic

I broke up the garlic bulbs by separating the individual cloves that make up the bulbs.  There were a few bad cloves, but when all of them were separated, I had 80 individual cloves, which equates to about 13 cloves per bulb.  Some were big and some were small, but I've found that most all of them will sprout and eventually grow into a garlic bulb.  According to what I've read, you need to plant them in the Fall so that you are assured of two months of cool weather growth that stimulates 'bulbing.'

Separating out the cloves

I normally plant garlic 4 inches apart, so I made a little guide for Benjamin using a big tent peg by marking four inch increments and using it as a planting guide.  This will keep the planting uniform and accurately spaced.  I had previously worked in a little composted chicken manure into the soil to assist in making the garlic jump out of the ground.

Homemade Planting Guide

We dug slight indentations one inch deep and placed each garlic clove in the hole, pointy side facing up, and covered the garlic so that the very tip was just covered with dirt.

Planting Garlic

Here is a view of part of the garlic row all planted with the cloves in the hole.  We planted them in rows of three.  I like them planted like this because you can straddle the row when harvesting them.

All the cloves are planted

Benjamin followed as I dug the holes with a knife and dropped the cloves in each hole and then he brushed dirt over them to cover them up.  In no time, we were done. 

Sometimes you just have to get your hands dirty

A day after we planted, I drug the water hose across the pasture and thoroughly watered the garlic row, hoping to imitate a good rainfall.  It has been pretty dry in October.  As the garlic grows, I'll mulch heavily between the growth with hay to discourage weed growth that competes with the garlic for soil nutrients.

Now that the garlic is planted, I have 7 or 8 months to read up and learn on how to store garlic better! This year we will hopefully have better results in garlic storage.