Beets and Me
"It is difficult to believe how the hardy, crunchy often rough looking exterior of raw beets can be transformed into something wonderfully soft and buttery once they are cooked."
-The Internet

"Beets have the highest sugar content of all vegetables, yet are very low in calories."
-From a website

Varieties
Ruby Red - early crop, flat to globular root

Detroit Dark Red - main crop, globular root
Monogerm - single-seeded variety

Formanova - long tubular root

Crobsy Greentop

Red Ace

There are also golden beets. They are not made out of gold, but just gold in hue. I love the word hue. Why isn't it used more? It only seems to be used in relation to the X-men, ie: Hue Jackman.

There are three sub-species of beet, The Sea Beet, the Beta Vulgaris and Chard. Chard is often called "swiss chard" because it is from Switzerland and the the swiss eat it like candy. I wish I could grow candy. But candy doesn't grow on farms. At least not in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Here's what they look like:


The enemies of the beet are the cutworm and the aphid. They are horrible. They eat and infest beets. They are of Satan. The black cutworm larvae is gray to dark brown above and has a greasy appearance. Faint light stripes run lengthwise down the body.

My great great grandfather Manheim cultivated Beets in Manheim, Germany. Some of the worlds greatest emporers and Czars have sipped Borscht made from the Beets of a Schrute. Then they wiped their Germanic lips and went off to conquer, warm tummies filled with my beet juice.

How does that make me feel? One word: Impotant.

Farming begins with the soil. That is why each day at dawn, Mose and I go to various points of the farm and taste the dirt. Literally. You can tell the PH and what I call the 'loam factor' with different parts of the tongue. Come to Schute farm at dawn and you will see the sillouettes of two lanky German farmers swirling dirt in their mouths as if it was a fine wine.

Do you have any beet stories or recipes or fun facts or pictures or lore, feel free to post below. Mose is known to read the responses and maybe he'll learn something worth passing on to me, his cousin, Dwight.

by Dwight K. Schrute