Here is Roger harvesting beets with me.
me holding the mother of all beets - it's bigger than my hand!
Results of the cutting of the beets to fit in jars. Chiogga is the name of the white/red rings beet and in the other bowl are Bull's Blood, Early Wonder, and Detroit Dark Red. The chiogga ones look pale in the jars, but I'm sure they will taste just as good. I've cooked them together with the more red ones for dinners and they absorb the dark red color - I think we'll do that if we can pickled beets again next year. We also planted Golden Touchstone which are a beautiful yellow, but there was only enough for one jar. We'd eaten the rest before today - they are delicious!!
Here are the finished jars - we (Sheila and I) got 12 pints and 28 half pints of pickled beets. Some we put cloves in with the pickling liquid. We tested this last year and it was very good. The one yellow jar is on the far right. The harvesting took a couple hours on Monday: digging, washing, chopping off roots and tops. The peeling, chopping and canning took 5 hours today. All well worth it!! yum!
