I'm surprised that you could even chew them that old. They get very woody with age.

Nope. Not woody at all. Texture and mouth-feel exactly like younger beets. I think lack of water makes for woody beets. Mine were in a bed they shared with cukes, so they had plenty of water. In my many years of growing beets over the summer, I've never had a woody one.

I suppose it might have been the variety you grew that allowed them to stay eatable so long. As to the issue of taste.... still might be age.

Detroit Dark Red. Another issue is fierce summer heat. I've seen it written that in root crops, high heat actually *concentrates* flavors. Sure didn't do that here. I should say that in other years, I've finished harvesting my crop in July or August, with no loss of flavor. This year, these escaped harvest until now.

I had so many beets one year after harvesting in early November that I bagged them up in gallon ziplock bags and stored in the refrigerator. They kept til March. At least that is when I ate the last of them. The flavor was great thru January then started to disappear. The beets I ate in March despite looking good had very little flavor. I vowed never to keep them that long again. I will resort to making pickled beets out of them if I can't eat them all in 3 months.

That's kinda interesting. That beets just "wear out", whether in the ground or harvested. The information available on vegetable storage is really pretty abysmal. You'd like to believe the produce marketing industry would be really interested in that kind of stuff, but I can't find much. Oh, everyone says you can keep beets in the fridge for a few months, but no one says what happens to them when you do, and who has room in the fridge to store a large harvest of veggies? So you keep them in the ground instead.

Figure out what they did with beets 100+ years ago. We are so different now with common refrigeration, grocery stores, and common use of plastic.

The summer long heat can't help either, but I don't know if that made a difference.

spartanapples said that beet taste didn't survive refrigeration. Betcha 100 years ago, they just were happy to eat tasteless beets. I don't think grocery stores and plastic have anything to do with this.