Digging the beets

How to be 12-month self-sufficient in beetroot; chicken/hen mandatory housing order; and a recipe for chocolate and beet cake

Last week, I was praising the virtues of kale, and particularly its Hungry-Gap-busting abilities at this time of the year. Beetroot can do a similar job for you, albeit from your ‘larder’ as opposed to the veg patch. In this post on Instagram last weekend I was talking about doing the year’s first sowing of beetroot while on the same day continuing to ‘harvest’ my own beetroot from a box of sand in the garage. I always get a kick from this, I suppose because it’s a good showcase (show off?) of the fact that we’re self-sufficient in beetroot all year round. This might sound like a hard core GIY challenge, but actually it’s pretty straight forward with beetroot if you do a couple of well timed sowings during the year and have the space to dedicate to it.

Beetroot has a number of virtues that take it in to my top 5 most important veg to grow each year:

1. I find it to be one of the most reliable and easy veg to grow, pretty much impervious to germination problems, or the pests and diseases that can blight other veg (take a bow brassicas). Significantly, slugs don’t seem that bothered with beetroot seedlings.

2. It’s great value for space, thanks to the fact that the plants are spaced just 10cm or so apart in a row (with the rows spaced 30cm apart), which means that in a standard 1m long raised beds you will get 30 beetroot. If each of those beets was the size of a cricket ball that’s a lot of food from a meter.

3. Beetroot is a 3-in-1 plant with the root, leaves and stems all edible - the baby leaves from the first sowing (see below) are always a valued source of salad leaves in the early summer garden; and we use the stems in stir fries.

4. Critical to year-round self sufficiency is that it stores really well, because beetroot isn’t as hardy as kale or celeriac - heavy frosts and cold will kill it off when it’s in the ground. But it will keep for 4-6 months buried in a box of sand in a cool garage. You simply twist off the leaves, and lay beets on a layer of sand in a box (making sure they don’t touch each other) and then cover over with another layer of sand. You can then ‘harvest’ beets from the sand as needed through the winter.

5. Beets are super good for you - any veg that has a vibrant colour is going to be good for you thanks to their high levels of carotenoids, but beets are one of the few vegetables that contain betalains, a powerful antioxidant that gives them their vibrant color (and makes your pooh red). Betalains reduce inflammation and it is believed may help protect against cancer and other diseases.

The key to making them the surefire 100% reliable GIYer’s veg is to start them off in module trays. Many growing books and websites will advise sowing them direct in the soil and I have done them this way too, but found the germination rates a little patchier when they are sown outside. Our Head Grower in GIY Richard always gives out to me for advising people to sow them in module trays since he views this as a waste of time when they do well in the soil directly. That may be the case for commercial growers, but for amateurs like myself it’s not really a massive time investment to start then off in module trays to transplant later. When sown in module trays, 100% of the seeds will germinate reliably and I have never had a failure in transplanting them. In fact, since beetroot seeds are actually a cluster of seeds, you will usually get multiple seedlings in each module which was always a source of confusion for me since I only sowed one seed..! Once they have germinated, I remove excess seedlings, leaving just one in each module to grow on. Incidentally beetroot don’t seem sensitive to being left for a couple of weeks too long in the module tray, the way some other crops would.

And so to the all important timing of the sowings. This is what I do (in all three cases, the seeds are started in module trays for later planting):

1. First sowing in February using a heating mat underneath the trays. This sowing will be transplanted in to the beds in the Polytunnel around the end of March. It would be too cold to plant them outside at that time of the year. So I think the key to our 12-month self-sufficiency plan is having a Polytunnel for the early planting. All going well these roots will be ready to eat (probably golf ball sized) in May when the roots in the box of sand in the garage are just about running out. If you don’t have a greenhouse or polytunnel you will probably have a gap of about 1-2 months in your supply which isn’t the end of the world I guess. Given you will be mad to eat these first beets when they are quite small, you will likely get through this first crop quite quickly.

2. Second sowing in late March - this will be planted out in the veg patch outside in late April, early May and will be ready to eat in late June/July just in time as the tunnel crop finishes harvesting

3. Third sowing by mid July - this is the winter storage crop so its timing is the most important of all. You want to sow this final batch just before the growth goes out of the year in late summer but late enough that they will survive the winter in storage. These are lifted/harvested in October before the first of the frosts can damage them and then put in a box of sand.

In each sowing, I sow a full module tray of about 80 beets, for an annual total of 240 - I guess that means our consumption averages around 5 beets a week. This also suggests that at 30 beets per meter, I am giving over around 8 meters of veg patch bed (between the tunnel and outside) to growing beets each year. Given what we get out of it, that seems like a fair allocation of resources.

A question often arises here, why not do fewer, bigger sowings and pickle the beets for storage? Well, the big slimy slabs of vinegary beets in salads in the refectory in Gormonston were enough to put me off pickled beets for life and I much prefer the beets fresh. They are way more versatile that way - to be baked in the oven or used raw grated in to salads and so on.

Weather and Chicken Woes

I’ve been feeling a little grumpy this week and I reckon the weather and long winter are getting me down a bit. My two great mentors/teachers, Eckhart Tolle and Pema Chodron advise gratitude and cheerfulness practice for times like this, but in a long dreary winter when you are awaiting spring, that can be tougher than you’d think. Let’s just say the gratitude doesn’t come quite so easily, and the cheerfulness is dormant (much like the garden).

Though we’ve started some tentative sowings and other spring like activities, the weather continues to be shite. For the last week we’ve endured a vicious cold snap with an easterly wind blowing in from Siberia to cut you in half and little sunshine by day to warm you up or cheer the soul. The heating mat has been struggling to maintain sufficient temperatures under the trays in the glasshouse. Now, it’s warmed up a little, but there’s been horrendous rain for 4 days - the garage flooded and the garden is sodden again.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, we got word from the Department of Agriculture that a mandatory housing order for poultry keepers comes in to effect from Monday (17th) because of cases of the highly pathogenic Avian Flu (HPAI H5N1) - the latest case of which is a little close to home (confirmed in a peregrine falcon in Co. Wexford).

This is the fifth confirmed case of the virus in a wild bird in Ireland since December. This morning I read that over 60,000 chickens are to be culled in a single commercial chicken business in Northern Ireland because of a suspected case of the Avian flu - this is the disaster scenario that must have agriculture ministers across the world awake at night, where the flu gets in to a huge commercial flock from a wild bird with the risk of a rampant infection spreading to their human handlers.

My thoughts on reading the news from NI was yes, sympathy for the business owner at what must be a devastating development for them (and for the poor chickens too) but also shock at the sheer number of birds - 60,000 birds in one business? I mean of course I know that the demand for chicken and eggs necessitates this kind of volume, but it’s a reminder of the industrial nature of our food system and that when things go wrong in a food system of this scale, they go really wrong.

The mandatory housing order affects our little GIY flock at Curraghmore too and so affects our veg box and Larder customers at GROW HQ. Our customers just LOVE the eggs. We have just 200 hens in two separate housing units (100 in each house) laying lovely eggs and helping us to clear land and fertilise the soil with their pooh. From tomorrow there will be no more happy free-ranging for them, as they will have to be kept inside the houses. 😔 This will mean, unfortunately a deterioration in the quality of the eggs, as it’s the forage and green grass they feed on by day that makes the eggs so special. We will try to mitigate this by getting some greens in to them in the house, but it’s not quite the same.

I am not 100% sure whether the housing order applies to my 10 hens here at home - the presser from the Minister here isn’t clear on that. The libertarian / contrarian smallholder in me hates being told what to do on things like this but on the other hand it’s probably the responsible course of action to bring them in too. And of course, all poultry keepers should be really vigilant, keep a close eye on the health of your birds and wash your hands carefully after handling hens and eggs.

You will be glad to hear that this weekend my little baby nephew Alex came to stay for a night with us while his Mam and Dad went for a well-deserved Valentines night away - so the cheerfulness quotient has been restored.

Recipe of the Week - Chocolate and Beetroot Cake

It probably is not a surprise to you by now to hear that beetroot does wonders as an ingredient in cake, particularly when paired with chocolate. This cake is delicious, flour free and easy to make.

Ingredients

• 100 ml rapeseed or sunflower oil

• 220g cooked beetroot

• 150g soft brown sugar

• 1 tbsp baking powder

• 50g cocoa powder

• 200g natural yoghurt

• 2 tsp vanilla extract

Ingredients

Heat oven to 180°C/160°C fan/gas 4. Grease and line a deep 2- cm springform cake tin. Tip the beetroot into a food processor and whiz to a puree. Add the remaining ingredients, along with a pinch of salt, and blend until well combined. Scrape into the cake tin, level the surface and bake for 50 min to 1 hour, or until a skewer comes out clean.