HAVE you ever gone out into your garden and pulled a good panful of little beets, to thin the crowding globular roots, and incidentally to have for dinner a dish of beets, boiled, tops and all, and dressed with a little vinegar to temper their sweetness? Or have you bought from market, or from your favorite vegetable man at the back door, red beets, none bigger than a hen's egg, smooth, fine-grained in flesh, that came to the table sliced and sizzling in their ruddy juice, seasoned with salt, pepper, sugar, and butter? Another thrill of the same sort comes when mother opens, as a special treat, a can of those tender little beets she put away in spiced vinegar. Can you name a vegetable that matches young beets in delicacy of flavor, or in beauty of color when served on the table? All the year round beets are to be had in market, for they are kept in root cellars all winter, and there are spring, summer, and fall varieties that 150 any one with a garden can raise for himself. Some are red, some white, some banded red and white, when cut across. Some are yellow, some banded yellow and red.
To avoid the stringiness that one sometimes finds in beets, the gardener plants his seed in rich, deep soil, and keeps his plants growing rapidly. By weeding and hoeing, he keeps the soil in good condition, and saves the moisture in it. Water ing is necessary in dry weather. Then he must not forget to thin them as the plants become crowded, and to pull them when they are in the best condition—not to leave them past their tender stage.
The common ways of cooking beets are boiling and baking. More commonly we boil them for later use in salads, and pickled. Baked beets have a deeper color, and firmer texture than boiled ones. In no case should the skin be broken. The stubs of the leaves should be left on, the beets scrubbed with a brush and rinsed. Then no loss of sugar, flavor or color will be suffered in cooking, and skin and leaf stubs will slip off easily before the slicing.
Besides the garden beets, a race of coarse-fleshed but very nutritious beets, called mangel-wurzels, are grown as a field crop to feed to stock. They
have very large leaves, and the roots often rise partly out of the ground.
One race of beets has been developed as orna mental plants, the foliage beets, used in Europe for carpet bedding and borders of flower gardens. The ribs and veins of the leaves are high-colored, and the varieties differ in form and coloring.
Even the garden beets are second in importance to the sugar beets, a race that furnishes the sugar grown in temperate climates.
Sugar beets are usually small varieties, with small tops, the flesh white or yellow. The taper ing root goes deep and drinks in the soil moisture, which is the raw material out of which the leaves manufacture the sugar. That is stored away in the fleshy root, and later extracted by machinery.
To understand how the beet was made a sugar producing plant we must know its way of making seed. It is biennial. That means it takes two years to complete its growth. The first year is consumed in producing a leafy top and a fleshy root. Then the top dies and the plant rests. Next spring the top sends up a flower stem, and the flesh of the root is absorbed by the flowers and seed pod as they form. When the seeds are ripe the root and stem are withered and dead. They have done their work. Each wrinkled seed case, the size of a pea, contains several small, brown, kidney-shaped seeds. We mistake the pod for a seed, unless we open one and explore it.
The wild parent of all the beets is a weed that grows on the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, and also on the Canary Islands, and inland in Eurasia as far as Persia and Babylon. It is found in muddy shore soil in England and parts of Scot land and Ireland.
We know that the wild beet has been in process of cultivation a little over two thousand years. This makes the family line of these vegetables very short compared with that of cabbages, which have been grown from ancient times, possibly six thousand years.