Sweet Beets
Grow and enjoy one of the sweetest and most nutritious vegetables, with a recipe for baked beet salad.
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These hefty 'Red Ace' beets provide delicious roots and highly nutritious greens.
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Enjoy one of the sweetest and most nutritious of all
vegetables. —
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By John Navazio
The humble beet has provided earthy Subsistence to
cottagers and kings since prehistoric times, and many
gardeners and cooks today remain passionate about the crop
because of its easy culture, unique flavor and exceptional
nutrition.
Baby leaves of beets make a scrumptious addition to your
salad mix soon after they sprout in spring. As winter
approaches, their hefty roots are one of the last crops to
come out of the garden, and they are easy to store through
the cold season. And amazingly, beets have twice as much
natural sugar as corn, carrots or tomatoes.
This vegetable is widely adapted to most of North America;
deep sandy or loamy soil, free of stones and with good
drainage, produces the most uniformly shaped beets.
A crop will grow best under cool, moist conditions but,
once well-established, will tolerate hot summer weather
well — as long as the soil has sufficient moisture
for even, steady growth. Beets are quite cold-hardy. They
can go into the ground during your first early spring
plantings, and the plants can remain in the garden until
after fall freezes. Beets remain undamaged even when
temperatures drop into the mid-20s.
Another convincing reason to grow beets, in contrast to
such root vegetables as carrots or potatoes, is the speed
at which they produce a crop. Within three weeks of sowing,
you can have young plants cranking out leaves for salads;
certainly within five weeks, you can harvest succulent baby
beets to cook whole for gourmet fare; and within eight
weeks (depending on the variety), you can harvest
market-sized beets and lots of leaves for steamed greens.
A SUPER-NUTRITIOUS CHOICE
Nutritionally speaking, beets are exceptional sources of
essential vitamins and minerals. They are rich in calcium,
iron, magnesium, potassium, vitamin C, thiamin, riboflavin,
vitamin A and vitamin K (see "Better Than a Multi-vitamin,"
right). Beets store most of these nutrients in their leaves
— which beet-eaters sometimes neglect — but
recent investigations into their nutritional make-up bode
well for the roots as well. Irwin Goldman, a beet
geneticist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has
shown that beet greens and beet roots are one of the best
dietary sources of folate, which is one of the B vitamins.
FROM THE TOPS DOWN
Beet leaves, also called "tops" or "greens" in gardening
parlance, have been highly praised for their taste and high
nutritional content since humans first cultivated this
vegetable in pre-Roman times. Goldman says that during the
time of the Romans, people selected the progenitor of the
modern beet from a wild plant in the Mediterranean region
to use as a leaf vegetable. The plant probably resembled
the Swiss chard of today, which may be a bridge crop
between the original leafy beet cultivated from the wild
and today's modern table beets.
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