« Olivia White Hospice Garden Project | Main | Flagstaff Community Market »
September 28, 2008
Beets: The New Spinach
Master Gardener Column 9/27/08
On Christmas Eve 1944, as a 17-year-old soldier, I was assigned to a unit of the Headquarters of the Army's Alaskan Department, which, among other things, tracked criminals and saboteurs in the unmapped Alaskan wilderness long before it became a state. We used the legendary "Alaskan Scouts" as mushers because only they knew the lay of the land.
As an 18-year-old buck sergeant with a squad of five, we once tracked a deserter and saboteur who had beheaded his wife with an ulu knife. After five days, we caught him, returning him to Fort Richardson. Our swagger stick lieutenant, hallucinating in a sub-artic winter night's swirling whiteout, envisioned the colonel sipping a martini in the Officer's Club and ineptly shot off a flare. A miniscule shard landed on my back, resulting, after years of operations to remove recurring benign tumors, in a hole in my lower-left back causing me to tilt to the left. The lieutenant was dispatched to the "psych" ward at Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco, later becoming a corporate attorney.
Wanting to give us a treat, the mess hall cooks made cherry jello laced with canned beets, fruit being rare and dear. The gastronomic shock lingers still, a pity because beets are a marvelous vegetable.
.
Some misguided souls consider beets plebian, believing things grown underground are Cro-Magnon. Of course, so are the patrician truffles which aren't even roots, but fungi.
The simplest way to eat this nutritious vegetable is to roast it after wrapping each one in aluminum foil. After that, it's easy. Pierce it with a fork, slip off its skin with a paper towel, and slice it. Some dash it with butter or olive oil and salt and relish a savory vegetable. Jam-packed with powerfully nutritious compounds, vitamin C, beta- carotene, folic acid and two different anti-oxidants, beets have received the imprimatur of the New York Times with the imprint: "The New Spinach."
The slick thing about beets is that their leaves are tasty and nutritious, too, with vitamin A, folic acid, potassium and iron. As for the sniffy crowd who disdain beets, they might be displeased to discover that the fancy bagged salads in the market contain beet greens which are actually various shades of red.
The beet world has expanded from the old, reliable Detroit Red, which actually came from Canada across the river from Detroit. For all of those who love beets, the bestest beet of all is the English bull's blood beet. Dark red, its leaves are great in salads, and its roots, especially when young, are a delight with a sweet depth of flavor.
In addition to the bull's blood, the fancy Italian beet, chiaogga, is also an heirloom. With its concentric rings of pink and red, it's a great treat to the eyes and tongue sliced in salads and as a side dish.
For those who want a milder flavor with a different color, there is Burpee's Golden. In addition to the bull's blood, Detroit Red, chiaogga and Burpee's Golden, there are many heirloom and hybrid varieties. Almost all of them can be harvested within 50 to 60 days, which makes them useful in Flagstaff's short growing season. As a cool season vegetable, the seeds can be planted about a month prior to the last spring frost.
As beets have become more fashionable, most commercial nurseries now stock seeds of many varieties, one popular package includes bull's blood, chiaogga and Burpee's Golden.
Beets don't require a green thumb. Black and brown thumbs do well if they do as they're told. The first direction is good humus, compost enriched, well-aerated soil, the kind of soil that flows through a gardener's fingers. A balanced fertilizer rich in nitrogen does best. Finally, hand weed and water regularly. Resembling Grape-Nuts, beet seeds aren't actually seeds, but fruit containing several seeds so several plants may come from one fruit which means thinning.
With the New York Times' imprimatur, beets, no longer plebian, but now patrician, can be savored by both the cognoscenti and those who like just plain old good eats.
Dana Prom Smith, a Master Gardener volunteer and coordinating editor of this column for the Coconino County Cooperative Extension, can be contacted at stpauls@npgcable.com. For more information, call Hattie Braun at 774-1868, Ext.17 or visit our Web Site: highelevationgardening.arizona.edu
Posted by maxmaddy at September 28, 2008 1:06 PM