The penultimate harvest of this year – red beets. I dug them out while my back was still aching. Funnily enough, it hurt less whilst doing this than when trying to sit in a chair.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I planted them as a companion plant to the butternut squash on a trellis, and they performed slightly worse than I expected. The squash produced a lot more leaves (and fewer fruits), so the beetroots were shaded a bit too much. So the lesson learned – if I should do this again in the future, I would have to space the pumpkins more.

Still, I got about 1 kg of radish-sized bulbs that could be canned. My mother processed them as follows:

The vegetables:
1 kg of beetroots
100 g carrots
7 medium-sized onions
2 red peppers
100 g butternut pumpkin

The beetroots need to be first cleaned and boiled whole in a pressure cooker for about 30 minutes (bigger roots for longer). Then they can be peeled and cut into equal-sized chunks. The carrots were cut into slices and shortly blanched for 10 minutes in salt water. The onions were cut into slices, the pumpkin and peppers into strips.

The pickling solution:
300 g sugar
2 l water
600 ml vinegar
1 spoon black pepper whole
1/2 spoon allspice
6 cloves
8 bay leaves
3 spoons of mustard seed

All boiled together for 10 minutes, the spices (except the mustard seeds and bay leaves) were put in a tea bag so they can be removed. While the solution was hot, the carrots, onions, and peppers were added and boiled for 1 minute. Then the pumpkins. And while it was hot, it was filled into pre-heated and sterilized jars with twist-on lids. Once it cooled, it formed a vacuum seal.

My mother got the recipe for the pickling solution from one of her former colleagues, and AFAIK, this was the first time she actually used it.