Organic Beetroot: Bull’s Blood

Description

Organic Beetroot: Bull’s Blood. Beta vulgaris.

Bull’s Blood is a very old variety of beetroot from The Netherlands. As its name suggests it’s a deep red colour throughout and its deep red leaves look great in salads too.

How to grow:
Greenhouse: Direct sow from mid Jan to mid March.
Outside: Direct sow from April, successional sowing will keep you in beets all season. Sow a few seeds in loose clusters, each cluster about 20cms apart and in rows about 30cms apart, that way they’ll grow handy to pick bunches. For pickling sow in the second half of May.
Time to maturity is around 8 weeks depending on the conditions.

Storage:
In autumn, when frost is absent, remove the leafage and store the beets in trenches on a frost-free location. Cover them up with sand. Or dig up and store in a mouse proof container in damp sand.

Problem solving:
Beetroot are pretty easy to grow, just make sure they’re in a rotation. Slugs will like the young leaves and in older beets you’ll find they eat the tubers, it doesn’t affect the taste just the look of them.

Favourite ways to eat them:
Beetroot are a wonderful winter storing veg. As a biennial they’ll store well with your carrots, parsnips and other roots over winter.
You can boil them for pickling or freezing. You can grate or slice raw into salads, sliced looks great with those pink circles. Young leaves are also tasty in salads. Tubers and leaves can be added to stews, risotto (makes the rice pink), casseroles or even on their own, braised with onion and leek, served up with rice and salad.
Borscht is a beetroot soup popular in the middle east, said to originate from Ukraine.
Beetroot is also purported to stabilise blood pressure, both high or low as well as clearing your breath if you had too much garlic last night!
A must have for the juicer.

Cultural history:
Originating around the middle east it was the leaves that were originally eaten. Their crop wild relative was sea-beet, which is still common around our own coasts. We don’t advocate eating our wild plants as so much habitat has and continues to be lost.

Seed weight is around 50 seeds per gram.