May Harvest: Sugar Beets

Last fall I planted two beds of sugar beets. We had a colder-than-normal winter, so they didn’t do terribly well, but I did get some, and my harvest was better than my tries in years past. I pulled them all the other day in anticipation of preparing the bed to plant something else.

Sugar beets make excellent livestock feed, which is my primary reason for growing them. Both the greens and the roots are edible, so I chopped some to feed fresh ad dried the rest for my goats’ vitamin and mineral mix (the same one that the garlic leaves went in to). The goats got the smallest roots too, but with the larger once I decided to see if I could make beet sugar.

In the U.S. “sugar” is a generic term that applies to both cane and beet sugar. Unless an ingredient list on a product label specifically specifies “cane sugar,” then it could be either one or a mix of the two. Taste-wise it doesn’t seem to make a difference, but all the commercial sugar beets grown here are genetically modified. So for those of us wishing to not eat GMOs, understanding that is important. Non-GMO sugar beet seed is still available to home gardeners, however, and that’s what I planted.

I used the directions in Grandpappy’s Recipes for Hard Times by Robert Wayne Atkins. I reviewed this book awhile back (here) and it’s still one of my “must have” self-reliance books. Instructions for making beet sugar is one reason, as is how to make pectin for jam and jelly making and how to make yeast from hops. (I’d love to have a copy of Grandpappy’s Survival Manual for Hard Times, but yikes it’s pricey!)

The directions called for finely chopping, shredding, or slicing the cleaned roots, placing in a pot, and covering with water.

There were simmered until tender, about an hour. Then the cooking water was strained out and put in my crockpot to further cook down. The cooked beets are edible, so at dinnertime I sauteed some in butter to heat them up and we gave them a try. How were they? I thought they were good but Dan said he likes red beetroot better. The cooked beets can also be squeezed to remove more of the juice. Pulp would be welcomed by chickens and pigs!

To make actual beet sugar, the cooking water must be cooked down until it crystallizes. Just like making maple sugar. The alternative is to cook it down to a thick syrup and use it that way. Mine cooked in the slow cooker for the rest of the day and was turned off at night. Early the next morning I fired it up again to continue cooking. By the following afternoon it was dark and still watery. But it was smelling sweet, so I took a tiny taste.

And? Yes it was sweet but it also had a bitterish aftertaste! Yuk! That was all I needed to know and abandoned the experiment.

Conclusion? Don’t bother with making sugar or syrup; just use them raw for animal feed. In a hard times situation they certainly could be eaten by humans, and of course the greens are edible too.

So there you have it. If anyone else has tried this with better success, I’d love to hear about it!