Here we are sowing them in a whiskey barrel container but you can sow these seeds anywhere
in the ground or in the raised beds as well
and although this is the way I recommend that you start beets you can also start beets in
seed starting kits like these
and this season I did start my beet seeds separately in these seed starting pellets
and if you have watched my monthly gardening series you might have seen that I have planted
this in the fall season
I started sowing my seeds in the fall season and then now I am transplanting these beets.
Now beets are cool season crops so start your beets or transplant them when the temperatures
reach to about 50-60 degrees on an average
and beets will survive low temperatures and they will actually do very well in low temperatures
Also make sure that your beet plants are getting enough sunlight, usually beets need about
6-8 hours of sunlight because the winter sun is not that strong
However, I would say that you need at least about 5 hours of sunlight for your beet plants
If you don't have a sunny spot for your beets you are going to be seeing very less of the
root development and your beets won't look as healthy
Now to get decent sized beet roots you need to space them apart and I grow beets for both
the roots as well as the tops so I have spaced them about 4-6 inches apart
but if you want really big roots you need to space them even further apart at least
about 8 inches or so
and then at least about 12 inches between rows
but in my case since I use the beets in such a way that we cook the beet roots as well
as the beet greens together
and that is why I'm looking for medium to large sized roots
and now let’s look at the harvest, as you can see here the harvest that we have is pretty
decent, the beet roots are pretty decently sized
now do not expect monster sized roots as the one's you find in the grocery store
When you are growing organically expect some compromise on the size of the beet roots,
however they are delicious
and since we will be using both the tops as well as the roots this is a pretty good harvest
and as you can see here beautiful looking roots after they've been washed
These are the beet roots and then the greens as well absolutely fresh and delicious
and I have grown beets in the past as well and this is how the harvest turned out on
a couple of occasions
and you can see that the beet roots haven't grown to a large size and that was partly
because of the spacing and partly because they were not getting enough sunlight
Now if you look at this beet root right here, it’s pretty well sized it's a pretty big
beet root
and this is because the soil here is a lot more sandy than the one in my raised beds
Now beet roots prefer sandy soil naturally so if you have sandy soil you can expect to
get slightly larger beet roots
and another amendment that I did for this area was that I added a lot of bone meal which
has lot of phosphorus and that's great for developing big beet roots
So there we have it folks, that was our episode on growing beets
