Summer in the Pacific Northwest provides bounty in many ways, even when the sunshine is sometimes less than consistent. Outdoor activities are plentiful: sailing, hiking, photography, evening concerts at local community parks, plus pleasures such as grilling dinner fare of fresh vegetables from the nearby outdoor markets. It can be challenging to figure out how to fit onto the calendar everything that one would like to do, enjoy, experience!
Perhaps I offer all of this by way of explaining why I haven't blogged in a while? :) (I have a backlog of a few posts that I still hope to get to.)
The Northwest is also a region of many gardening enthusiasts, me included. I don't have room for more than a few potted plants outside my front door. This summer I've thoroughly enjoyed my Tiger Lillies (or "Lilies," depending on your preferred spelling), a pretty blue Delphenium, and lovely purple Salvia, plus my forever faithful friend -- Lavender! Last year my upstairs neighbor filled a few spaces in the yard with multiple Lavender plants, so that we now have at least three varieties. Oh the happiness in that! I adore the huge slow black bumblebees that lazily zzzzttt around on the blossoms, collecting pollen until they can barely keep themselves airborne. Love in velvety black, with wings!
Meanwhile, Larry has been enthusiastically adding more raised beds to the small vegetable garden area we started a couple of years ago. Now there is a fairly expansive and impressive true-business (that's an ASL phrase :) garden!
Among other things, he has some enormous cabbage.
And the beets were plentiful and obscenely large this year!
Last year we ate beets fresh from the garden through the summer, and then did a harvest and canning project on September 1st. Here are a few pictures from last year's process.
We ended up with 6 quarts last year. That did seem a bit underwhelming--I remember the feeling from when I took this picture--after all the work that was involved. Still, they were pretty, and we enjoyed having beets available long after we couldn't get them out of the garden anymore.
This year, I dunno what happened, but the beets grew like wild. Larry had about three rows in one garden bed and another two rows in another bed. Those in the second bed were actually the plants he pulled out when he thinned the beets that initially came up in the first bed. He decided to go ahead and replant the pulled starts to use up the available space around the garlic. They thrived! Good strategy to remember for next year.
So, we harvested a LOT of beets this year. We did a rough weigh-in, with Larry standing on the bathroom scale first by himself, and then alternately holding the box of cleaned beets and then the box of greens. By our calculations, we had roughly 31 pounds of beets and 16 pounds of greens!
I hope that you're enjoying--or at least patiently tolerating--the number of pictures I'm including in this post. :) Clearly I've decided that beets are not only tasty, but also photogenic and even rather beautiful!
Harvesting, cleaning, separating, boiling to blanch, removing the skins from, and slicing up all those beets took several (many) hours. And it was a rather messy process! Jokes about crime scene investigation can hardly be avoided.
Larry and I working as a team are like a well-oiled machine. I'm convinved that we could win any reality television show we might enter together. Bring on The Amazing Race or some kooky Dr. Phil marital challenge. :) The only trouble would be that we work together so well that we don't even bicker or usually even get in each other's way, and that would make for really boring television so we would probably only last for an episode or two. :)
Anyway, the whole beet canning process went really smoothly, despite two jars that broke during the process of boiling the filled jars. Common collateral damage during the canning process, according to Larry.
When we were done, we had a total of about 19 quarts (mostly in quart jars, along with several 1-1/2 pint jars). Compared to only 6 quart jars last year! No wonder the whole process felt a lot more tiring this year. So much so that I left Larry's to drive home without even taking a picture of the finished product, the successfully canned jars lined up in pretty rows together! Larry took some pictures for me and I'll try to remember to add one here when I get them from him.
Here's my best photographic attempt at capturing a perspective on just how large some of the beets were this year! Larry hand-weighed one of the biggest ones and guessed it to be just under 2 pounds. And then later confessed that he was guessing pretty conservatively. This picture makes me think of blowing up a surgical glove to inflate it like a goofy balloon. :)
So, here I am at the end of this post, having found that there was actually a LOT more to say about beets than I expected!
Here's a final picture. Pardon if it seems irreverant. Unintentional when I took the picture. :) Beets are beautiful, even when they maybe look like weird googly eyes or something else, whatever your eye might see. :)
