Organic Beetroot: Chioggia

Description

Organic Beetroot: Chioggia. Beta vulgaris.

A mild flavoured, sweet tasting, pink skinned variety with white flesh and purple rings. It’s not just as hardy as the purple varieties we found, but if you have a sheltered spot it will grow well for you.

How to grow:
Direct sow from April, successional sowing will keep you in baby 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.

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.

Avg contents: 1g ~70 seeds.