Harvest

Growing & Harvesting Beets From Two Seed Packets

Beets are one of those crops that don't look like much in the beginning. We sow them straight into the garden, water them along with everything else, and for a while they're just another little green row. Then the tops start filling in, the roots begin showing at the soil line, and suddenly there's a harvest waiting underneath. This year, ours turned into a lot more than we expected.

Rows of beets and other vegetables growing in the Pasture Threads in-ground garden — The beet rows growing right alongside the rest of our in-ground garden.

Straight into the garden

We direct sow our beets rather than starting them indoors. Like the rest of our rows, we lay them out so the soaker hoses can run alongside them and we still have room to work as the garden fills in.

Early in the season it never looks like much — rows of dirt, little seedlings and a lot of waiting. Then the beet tops start filling out and suddenly the row is easy to spot.

Mature beet plants growing in a garden row with large green leaves and red stems — Once the beet tops fill in, there's no missing where that row is.

You can see the harvest coming

One nice thing about beets is that you don't have to wonder too much about what's happening underneath the soil. As they grow, you can start seeing the tops of the roots at the soil line.

We don't worry about every beet being exactly the same size before we harvest. A home garden doesn't work that neatly. Some are larger, some are smaller, and that's perfectly fine with us.

When the row looks ready and we have time to deal with the harvest, we start pulling.

Then we started pulling

This is the part that makes all the waiting worth it.

We worked our way through the row, pulling the beets and laying them in the grass as we went. No styled harvest basket or perfectly cleaned produce — just beets straight out of the dirt with their tops still attached.

And they just kept coming.

Freshly harvested homegrown beets with their tops attached laid out in the grass — The whole harvest laid out before heading inside.

From the garden to the kitchen

Once they were pulled, the next job was figuring out what to do with that many beets.

For us, the answer was pickling them.

We washed and trimmed the harvest, then turned it into jars of pickled beets we could keep enjoying long after the garden row was empty. That's the part of growing food I really love — watching something move all the way from a packet of seeds to the garden and finally into the pantry.

Worth a spot next year

Beets earned a place in next year's garden.

They fit easily into our early-season rows, didn't need to be started indoors, and gave us enough of a harvest to make preserving them worthwhile.

We'll probably change something the next time we plant them — we always do — but that's part of figuring out what works in your own garden.

This one is going back on the seed list.

Seed Starting

How We Start Seeds at Home: Our Simple Method

Laying out straight garden rows with stakes and string in the Pasture Threads garden.

Garden Planning

How We Lay Out and Plant Our Garden Rows

Our raised strawberry bed with a soaker hose running down the middle.

Fruit