Tuesday 3 October 2017

New Tenants & Beetroot Harvest

Sunday morning on Mill Green with a little rain first thing to meet Rob someone who has been on the waiting list since the 2nd June which I only found out about recently as Idverde have not been doing what they have been contracted to do and actually manage the allotments!.

Rob is very keen to get cracking and my only hope is that Idverde will process his paperwork swiftly as they can not deal with other outstanding issues I have because its all about sending out the invoices at the moment.

Once Rob had gone, I looked at the second bed of sweetcorn and it's still not ready and I fear may become squirrel food before I get to anything useable. Then it was off to Spence Road Allotment to harvest the last of the cucumbers and beetroots there. I ended up with a food bucket and half of beetroots of various sizes.

All the jars were rescued from the shed, washed and sterilised.

Rather than boil the beetroots or do the microwave thing I tried last year, this year I followed the advice from the Sarsons web link that someone kindly uploaded to the Grow Your Own Grapevine Forum where it advises "Heat the oven to 180C/160C fan. Carefully wash the beetroot then wrap in foil and bake for 1hr until tender. Set aside to cool then peel off the skins." and I have to say I placed them in trays and put foil over but cooked for and hour and a half as some of the first batch were massive.

What a difference, not a lot of steam, no mucking about, in and out of the microwave definitely they easiest way to process beetroots, and the skins came off so easy. I bought the Kitchen Food Tomato Fruit Egg Vegetable Slicer Slicing Helper in the photo above from ebay for between £2.30 to £6.99 with free delivery, but it made handling and cutting the beetroots so easy, and was well worth the money. The larger beets got cut down into segments that would fit in the cutting guide. 

With the Sunday afternoon and Monday evening processing I've ended up with 16 Jars of beetroots that have been, or will be distributed around the family. Based on how keen everyone is to have them I'm thinking another bed and successional sowing is in order next year to aid in the processing.

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