I do not like pickled red beets, and neither does my father. But my mother likes them so I sown two packets of seed into one bed about 3×1,5 m. They did not look like much for most of the summer but like the pumpkins, they took off in August rather spectacularly. I was expecting a harvest of about 6 kg, I got 18.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
There were some impressive specimens in there, but there was also a lot of vole damage. About half the roots were gnawed on, some almost completely eaten. I would prefer if those fuckers were at least systematic in their damage and ate the whole root before starting to nibble on another. It is a lot more work to process a damaged root.
Even so, the harvest was significant and I just spent three whole days mostly working on this. We only have one pressure cooker and some beets were so big that they took up most of the space inside so it was almost non-stop boiling. My mother then peeled them and chopped them up to her preferred size and we canned them.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
It was a lot of work for little financial gain since pickled beets are fairly cheap. Financially, we would be actually losing money on this if I had better use of my time. But I don’t so my mother now has two-years worth of beets to snack when she wants to.
This does bring up a thing that has been on my mind a lot lately. I looked up some gardening things on YouTube and as it is, the algorithm started to recommend a lot of gardening videos all of a sudden. Some of them are good and I am always happy to learn, some are entertaining but not worth much, and some are downright fraudulent and/or stoopid (like pretending to grow a banana plant from banana peel).
It seems that there is a big fad going around about self-sufficiency and sustainability and these beets are a prime example of why that is simply not possible for most people.
I have over thirty years of experience in gardening and I have a huge garden (over 1500 ㎡). I also have very poor and rocky soil in my garden, and slugs, and water voles. But even if I had the best chernozem there is, and ideal pest control (cats, btw, do not usually hunt water voles, though their presence does deter them a bit), I could not be self-sufficient even if I did nothing else. Because whilst I can pull sometimes really impressive harvests even with the poor soil I have, and I could have rabbits, a goat, and/or poultry to eat the non-edible parts of plants and grass and slugs, etc. there is still one thing that can throw a stick into the spokes that is completely unpredictable and uncontrollable – the weather.
I wrote about how bad things looked in the summer this year. Some crops bounced back, some didn’t – very little onions and garlic, almost no strawberries (although that was intentional), no nuts, and no tree fruit whatsoever. And that is how things always go in small-scale growing. I can grow in a good year enough of some specific crop to last more than one year, but never the full spectrum and if it can’t be reliably preserved, it is waste anyway. To grow a full, balanced diet reliably, large-scale growing and, more importantly, trade over large-ish distances, are necessary.
Self-sufficiency is, and always has been, a myth. Pretty much nobody has ever really been self-sufficient -- survival has always been a community endeavour.
My allotment was an almost total write-off this year, thanks to awful weather and a biblical-style plague of slugs.
I actually really like pickled beets. Beetroot salad, fried eggs and mashed potatoes is a cheap staple from my childhood and I always enjoyed mashing the beets into the potatoes so I’d get violently magenta mash.
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When I grew up, my grandparents no longer needed the vegetable garden, but a lot of planing, harvesting, canning and freezing still took place. Even when they were young, the garden the garden was never meant to feed them, but to support them and lessen the grocery bill. For me, the garden is just fun. This year nothing grew but slugs and tomatoes (the huge concrete foundation keeps the slugs somewhat at bay), which is sad, but not a problem.
I love beets, but they don’t grow well in my soil.
Even with the annoying vole damage that is a very respectable harvest. I’ve got squirrels who are doing similar annoying things to my apples. Instead of stealing just one apple, they bite off a dozen, bruise them, and take bites out a few.
I’m processing applesauce tonight, and just finished processing some cornelian cherries in syrup for sharbat.
It’s delicious mixed with plain or sparkling water.
We haven’t a single walnut left on the tree because of squirrels, even had I wanted to pick them green to pickle I’d have struggled to get enough to be worthwhile. The squirrels started in on them about a month before they would have been right for pickling.
On the other hand we do have potatoes, cabbages (Savoy and Sweetheart), broccoli, onions, and garlic. But the shallots were pathetic.
Oh and I have 11lbs of damsons in the freezer, picked at a National Trust property, Brockhampton Manor, with extensive orchards. We were staying in one of the cottages they rest out on the estate, my SiL and BiL were going to a folk festival nearby and the cottage had more space than they needed, so we took our new dog on her first holiday. The damsons will be turned into jam, chutney and any left over into a crumble or two. I wasn’t able to start any of that as I had to go and support my best friend, his wife was taken into hospital with bronchiolitis exacerbated by a cold. BF has MS and the slight fever he got with the same cold was enough to take him off his legs, they no longer work properly at the best of times, and fever reduces the limited insulation of the remaining nerve sheaths. While I was there we discussed their crops this year, which have amounted to nothing at all, just too much cloud and rain.
I had to look up what a damson is.
One good thing about a good fruit harvest is that there are plenty of tried and true methods for preserving it for years.
Squirrels have never been a big problem around here. There is a pair of black squirrels that frequent our garden -- I met one just about an hour ago when going to check if everything in the greenhouse is OK -- and they steal a bit of bird feed and some nuts, but not so much that I would care about it. There are a few huge fertile oaks in the vicinity, as well as plenty of hazels, so they do not concentrate on the garden itself that much. Voles are far worse because once they start to munch on a fruit tree, they build a network of tunnels under it and won’t stop until the roots are completely destroyed.
I tried to plant a few tulip bulbs two years ago. Not a single one survived winter, they all got eaten by voles without me even noticing it.
Jazzlet
Ahhhh, Zwetschgen, or better said “quetsche” where I come from. My gran used to make pie-ish out off them: She’d make a huge amount of yeast dough, put it into pie forms, the destoned Quetsche in a spiral on top and a bit of sugar, depending on the sweetness of the fruit.
But my favourite part was that the leftover yeast dough would be turned into simple apple jackets.
For jam I can recommend “Latwerg”, which goes back to roam times: The damson are cooked with cinnamon and staranis (and sugar) for quite a while. But what do I hear: new dog?
Charly
I have come to hate the squirrels round here, grey squirrels which we shouldn’t even have here (imported from America some previous century, because they’re supposedly cute), because they have caused so much damage. Apart from the walnut theft there was the chewing through of bean strings, which also either broke the bean stem or pulled the whole plant up and why? there are plenty of other things they could have chewed on. Then there are the special bird feeders to stop them (and the rats to be fair) stealing all the bird food, and the window feeder that the magpies used -- I could sit here and they’d be about 2m away -- which a squirrel completely destroyed. I could go on, but I’m already clenching my teeth, so I do understand about the voles.
Giliell
Ooooh, I never thought of adding cinnamon or star anise to damson jam, I’ll try it, thank you!
Yes, we finally found the right dog for all of us, we’ve had her a little over three months, from Manchester and Cheshire Dog Homes who have the contract to care for dogs picked up by the Local Authority. She was a street dog, chipped with a date of birth, name, and that she was a German Shepherd Dog. She definitely isn’t a GSD, too small, black and rusty red (the red isn’t an approved breed colour, and I’ve never seen a GSD with red like this), too slim, her legs are longer than a GSD’s would be and she has enormous ears. We keep meeting people who think she is a Belgian Malinois, one of that country’s several shepherd dogs so I looked up the breed type and she could be, the thing that really stood out is that they have back teeth that scissor past each other, rather than just meet like those of most dogs (or humans). Well I already knew that she could slice through a lead and take the leg off a toy I bought her in seconds, so I had a good look and yes her teeth scissor. It isn’t important except in explaining her shape, colouring and intelligence. She’s the first dog we’ve had that learnt how to open the fridge, she was discover surrounded by packets of cheese she’d gather having eaten the most expensive, contemplating which to start on next! We now have a fridge lock. It does mean she is quick to pick up training, although she was pretty well trained when we got her, so a lot of what we are doing is fun stuff, which is lovely for all of us. People friendly, not bad with other dogs, though a bit too bouncy after the first sniff, but she’s still young and is already learning better manners. We are both completely smitten, but best of all so is my BiL who was (understandably) always wary of our last GSD, which means we’ve been away on holiday with him and Paul’s sister already, and will be able to go with them again. We are a proper family again.