Tag: salad greens
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Beetroot
Beetroot is a cultivar of Beta vulgaris mostly grown for its swollen taproot (other cultivars are predominantly grown for their leaves e.g. chard or leaf beet).
Being Australian, my favourite way to eat beetroot is as pickled slices in a hamburger served with egg. 🙂
You can also boil, roast and puree it and it teams up nicely with carrot and celery.
The leaves make a great flavour and colour addition to salads and sandwiches. Indeed I mostly grow beetroot for this reason.
Dried and powdered, the roots make for an amazing natural food colouring for curries or a healthy snack if left as a chip shape.
It is a herbaceous biennial but if grown for the root you will be planting and pulling after a couple of months.
Taste/Aroma:
The leaves taste like spinach. Raw, the roots taste and smell earthy. I don’t really like them raw finding that they sweeten with cooking.
Leaves:
Root:
Planting/Care:
Please see the link at the bottom of the page for when to grow this plant in my Grow It Perth calendar.
Beetroot loves a Mediterranean climate like we have in Western Australia but isn’t so keen about us during the peak of summer. Find a slightly alkaline sunny spot that is well draining and organically enriched.
Related Links:
- see more beetroot posts here
- go to all meal ingredients here
- go the Grow It Perth calendar
- see a work in progress map of edible plant species here
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Leaf Beet – Perpetual Spinach
This handy little leaf is not actually spinach proper but a member of the beet family. Who knew? 🙂
It doesn’t matter though because you can use them just as you would spinach leaves in a raft of dishes from salads to toasted sandwiches and stir fries.
The ‘perpetual’ part of the name is true though and you will get crop after crop.
Growing
Perpetual spinach is easy to grow from seed. I soak them overnight in a jam jar with water in it. Then I liberally sprinkle them over an area of prepared soil that gets full sun. I then cover the area with another thin layer of soil and gently water it in.
I keep the area moist but not waterlogged until the seedlings emerge. After that I water normally.
Pest control:
I use Pyrethrum spray if they are getting attacked by caterpillars, spray this on the top and the bottom of the leaves. My son and I regularly hunt for slugs and snails, both get a squishing and the shells get mixed into the garden beds. Once the plants are going strong though, the best pest control is to harvest the leaves before they get attacked :).
Seven weeks after the seeds went in:
Related Links:
- see more posts using this leaf and spinach proper here
- go to all meal ingredients
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