This morning I was out in the garden early, and thinned one row of rutabagas and 4 rows of beets....
the beets After thinning
The rutabags After thinning....(those are mangels on the right)
Here's my haul from that job....Partway thru thinning the beets, I realized that quite a few of them were large enough to pickle....so I think that's what I'll be doing later today....
Here's the end result....a canner stuffed fulled, and packed down, loaded with beet tops....a five gallon bucket halfway full of rutabaga tops....and one bowl to come into the house, with the beets and one lonely rutabaga in it. The Gman likes rutabaga raw, too bad this was the only root of any size worth cleaning!
The beet and rutabaga tops will be fed to the hens and pigs....over the gardening season, we eat quite a lot of the beet tops ourselves, but we have plenty of plants left in the garden to satisfy us....and since we're always looking to reduce the animal feed we have to buy, well....a lot of the veggies and all the veggie waste goes to the animals.
They still need protein, and this won't supply it....but later on as we get the mangels and sugar beets harvested, they will supply that, so we hope to really notice the difference in feed bills, once the garden is a bit farther along.
Preparing the beets for pickling....I don't cut off the bottoms and I leave a good inch or two of top growth. This is so that the beets don't bleed too much during cooking. Sphere: Related Content
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