How to Harvest & Store Beets

Hi, this is Yolanda Vanveen and in this segment we're going to talk about how to harvest and store beets. Now beets are a wonderful vegetable and they're such a brilliant red color and they are great in salads or you can just boil them and use them in many, many different ways. But beets are easy to grow in the garden too and they grow underground just like a potato or any onion would and so they're really easy to grow and harvest. Now the first point is that when you do grow them, you don't want to harvest them when they're too small, if they're just tiny, tiny beets they haven't full matured and yet you don't want to wait too long until they're just a huge size because then they taste really woody and they just don't taste very good because they're just too fibrous inside. So you want to harvest them at the in between time and so what I do is just wait for them to grow and you have lots of greenery and towards the end of the summer, just keep checking on them like you would a carrot and just dig a few up and if they're not, if they're in between that point where they're not real small and not too big either, then they're ready to harvest. And you can just pull them right out of the ground and wash the dirt off of them and then just store them in a paper box in a cellar or the basement or in the garage or in a paper bag or you can keep them in the refrigerator as well. And a lot of times you can find containers that have holes in them so that they do get some air because if you keep them in plastic alone, sometimes they don't store for a long, long period of time. But beets are really easy to grow and really easy to harvest and you treat them just like you would onions.