Harvesting beets

It's been a lot of fun to have decent beets.  Our mountain raised beds (filled with compost) are ideal;  I've never managed to have much luck growing beets in the piedmont, even with heavily amended soil.

But we've been enjoying beets (and onions and garlic from the piedmont vegetable beds) -- hard not to like freshly harvested beets and their greens.  Yum.  Here are two views of the same bunch, directly after harvest (hmm, and just prior to being part of our dinner).

beets, onions, and garlic

beets, fresh from the garden

Harvesting garlic

Garlic is ready when roughly half of the leaves are brown (more if soft-neck and less if hard-neck, if I'm remembering right).

In practice, if the stalks are tipping over, it seems like it should be time to harvest.

I've now pulled two beds, with two more to come. Over 75 heads of garlic are now drying in my garden shed.

(Hmm, I might actually see a return on my investment in buying organic garlic to plant, from Hood River Garlic, in Oregon).

Some heads I've harvested were downright huge, compared to previous years. Abundant rain is surely a factor, although variety is important, too.

We had fresh garlic and onions with mushrooms and garlic scapes as our dinner vegetable this evening. Yum.