We have been cropping our Wild Sea Beet from out of the garden. A wonderful perennial crop that comes up each year without fail. It is quite frankly superior in taste and texture to the perennial beets or spinach beet that is offered in seed catalogues.
The texture when cooked is melting when eaten and the flavour light and delicious. Compared to the catalogue beets that are really quite coarse and the flavour a bit earthy. It is a case in point that sometimes selective breeding of a plant does not always produce something superior.
Wild Sea beet (Beta vulgaris ssp maritima ).
Sea beet can be found growing on many sea shores and can be easy to recognise from the clump forming habit and waxy leaves. Pick a few leaves for cooking or even eaten raw. They can be lightly steamed until soft.
Unfortunately the seeds are all but impossible to obtain. Ours came in with a load of seaweed we picked from the shore and just popped up in the garden as a fortuitous crop. Now it self seeds within the garden.
If you can find some plants on the shore, make a visit in late Summer and see if you can obtain a few seeds from the seed heads. They are easy to spot when brown and ripening over a lax clump of plants, the seed looks exactly like Beetroot seeds as the Sea beet is the ancestor of Perennial Spinach, Beetroot and Sugar Beet.
Take only a few seeds for your own use, but do not dig up the plant itself as you would be breaking the law under the Wildlife and Countryside act 1981.
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