You’ve probably seen red beets and even eaten them. I’m guessing you bought them from the store in a can like this:

But do you know where red beets come from? Have you ever seen a red beet plant? We grew our own red beets this year in one of our garden boxes. (The orange flowers you can see are Marigolds which can help keep bugs away from the red beet plants.)

The red beets grow under ground and then they are dug or pulled up. Here’s a closer look at the plants and what you can see above ground.

This is what one red beet looks like when it’s taken out of the ground.

A raw red beet is hard and is best eaten cooked. There is a process to follow if you want to cook red beets. First you cut off the top leaves, but it’s important to leave about 1-2″ of the stem intact. And you don’t cut off the roots. If the roots or the stem are cut off, the color will bleed out of the red beet when its cooked.

We sprayed the red beets outside with the water hose in order to remove the biggest part of the dirt from them. Then they were taken into our kitchen and put in the sink.

Next they are washed by hand and put into a large pot.

Water is added to the pot so that the red beets are all covered with water.

The water is brought to a boil and the red beets are cooked until the skin of the red beet will slide off the outside of the beet. The beets are then put into a large pan of cold water so they can cool. Once they are cool enough to be handled without burning your hands, each beet is gently “squeezed” and the skin, the root and the stem will slip right off.

And ta dah, there is your red beet ready for eating or canning into jars.

We canned or preserved our red beets so we will be able to eat them all through the winter time. In order to can the beets, they are cut into smaller pieces.

The red beets are packed into special glass canning jars and some salt and boiling water is added. A two piece set of a metal lid and a metal ring and placed on the top of each jar. Then the jars are processed in a pressure canner for a while. When the right amount of time has passed, the canner slowly cools down and once the pressure is gone, the jars of beets can be removed. As the jars cool, the metal lid will seal and that is what makes it safe to keep the red beets for a longer time on a shelf.

That is an abbreviated version of the canning process, so if you ever can red beets yourself, be sure to follow the instructions that come with your pressure canner. 🙂 Now you know where red beets come from! I hope you’ve enjoyed learning more about red beets!