New Found Love: Beets

I have never liked beets.

Until recently, I had only ever tried canned beets, which seemed like big lumps of tasteless jelly. However, Dan has always loved beets. While picking out veggies to plant in the garden I overlooked the beet seeds and went with typical squash, radishes, carrots, cucumbers and lettuce. It took some convincing from Dan, but I picked up a couple of packs of beets to add to our garden. I'm sooooooooo glad we did.

Recently the beets have grown to a good size and we've been picking them. I didn't want to just boil them, veggies tend to loose flavor and nutrients when you boil them, so I looked up different ways of cooking them. I chose the easiest method I found that did not involve boiling and they turned out really tasty. I took a between 7 to 8 beets placed them on some tinfoil. I then drizzled the beets with olive oil, sprinkled them with salt and pepper, wrapped them up in the tinfoil and put them in a preheated oven set at 325 for an hour and a half. After they were done I let them cool and peeled them. They are then ready to add to salads or just eat as a snack.

Yum, Yum, I'm really glad I tried beets again. Fresh beets straight from the garden are delicious!!!

Bountiful: For Bear

Mom wanted me to email my sister pictures of our garden, I figured I do it in a blog instead.

Our garden is doing great!!! We have harvested some squash, tomatoes, a potato, beets, radishes, spinach, swiss chard and lettuce. The cucumbers and watermelon are coming along slowly, but they're doing better than I originally thought. The corn is tall and starting to flower. The beans have been flowering a lot and we have a few small baby beans, can't wait for them to grow up. We have peppers, both sweet and hot, they're not quite ready to pick but they're doing well. The eggplants look good, but there have been no flowers or anything on them yet. The carrots are still coming along, we've eaten some baby ones that we picked while thinning them out the other day, they were tasty, but they still need a bit of time to get to a good size. The broccoli and cauliflower look like they're doing well, no flowers yet though. I'm so excited that the garden seems to be doing so well, I haven't had a real garden since I was a kid. I've really been enjoying it.

Pictures of the garden:

Potatoes, spinach, cauliflower, broccoli, and corn.

The squash.

Carrots, beets, beans and where the radishes used to be, but now we're growing more beets

Crook neck!

Zucchini!

Baby beans.

Sweet bell peppers.

Hot peppers!

And some green tomatoes!

What about a garden?

Now that we are at the ranch I really want to start a big organic garden. I'm not certain where we should start, but there is a plot of land where there used to be a garden and Glynn (Dan's brother) wants to restart a garden there. I'm thinking we'll have four subplots with three rotating annual subplots and one static perennial subplot. I would like to grow carrots, eggplant, squash, leafy greens, radishes, broccoli, peppers, peas, cauliflower, potatoes, garlic, ginger, and sweet potatoes, I don't like cucumber but I bet we'll end up planting that as well... I know a few people around here like them :^). I need to do some research to see what else we should plant. I would like to have an herb garden as well, but I think I would like to have it closer to the house than the main garden so I can go and grab some herbs easily while cooking.

One of the first things I want to do is get a compost system up and going. We are looking at different types of compost systems and so far I like the three section system. I like it because it can handle a large amount of material and it allows for staggered composting. One section is for storing compostable materials, another section is for active composting and the final section is for finished compost. It will look something like this, however, we will probably change some of the details.


If we stay here at Leonard Creek long enough I would also like to eventually build a greenhouse and a water catchment system.

I'm excited to get the garden project up and running. I had a small garden when I was a kid, but haven't had the opportunity in my adult life to start one. I can't wait to start learning more about gardening and about how to nuture the soil so it is as productive as possible. I am also excited to eat fresh vegetables right out of the garden... they are always the best.