Why Should You Be Growing Beets in the Garden?

Benefits of Beets

There are several health benefits when it comes to eating beets. The first benefit to growing beets is they can detoxify your blood and liver. Also, lower your blood pressure and provide lots of antioxidants to fight free radicals. While providing Vitamin C and fiber which is going to help with your digestive system. The last benefit is they can boost your stamina and give you good healthy energy needed for your body.

Growing Beets

On this week's episode, Travis is planting beets in the vegetable garden. Travis's favorite beets to plant are the red and gold beets that both have outstanding taste profiles. He is currently on his third succession planting of beets which means he has already harvested some from the garden and is continuing to plant more to get maximum yield of beets throughout the growing season. When dealing with raw beet seed it has a crinkly look that is uneven and looks similar to chard seed. If you plan to plant raw seed using a mechanical planted it is not going to work well so you will need to direct seed instead. However, with the pelleted beet seed, it works much better when planted in our Hoss Garden Seeder. We recommend transplanting beets in our seed starting trays to ensure we get better plant growth once they are planted in the garden. If transplanting in the ground the preferred spacing is 4 inches along the row. While direct seeding beets can be done it can also be a little tricky because beets do not germinate as well in certain soil conditions. You can direct seed beets with multiple rows close together and spaced as close to 6 inches apart. When planting beets in the garden, Travis likes to plant them on double rows to ensure he gets maximum spacing and yields during the growing season. In the episode, Travis is using our new Dibble Wheel attachment on his Single Wheel Hoe to mark the plant spacing for the beets going down the garden rows.

Multigerm vs. Monogerm Beets

Beet seeds are naturally multigerm varieties which means that each seed contains more than one embryo. Multigerm seeds happen when flowers grow in clusters which in return produces multigerm seed balls. When the seed balls germinate they produce 2 to 5 seedlings at once. So when planting you will end up with more than one seedling or plant per seed which requires some form of thinning of the plants. The thinning is important to ensure we get large production and uniform beet seeds. For instance, with our beet seeds, we want the same size round beets all along the row in the vegetable garden. In order to get these results, the beets should be evenly spaced along the garden row so we have to thin those to ensure they are 4 to 6 inches apart in the vegetable garden. Monogerm means that each seed contains one seedling per seed or one plant per seed. Therefore if you prefer to direct seed in the ground you should go with a monogerm hybrid variety like our Solo Beet variety.

Varieties of Beets

There are several different beet varieties that contain all the health benefits we mentioned earlier. The first variety is the Detriot Dark Red Beet which is an heirloom that is perfect for baby beet production or for pickling in jars to store for later. The Early Wonder Beet is an early-maturing variety that produces harvestable beets around 5 to 10 days quicker than most of the other standard beet varieties. While the Kestrel Beets are a productive hybrid variety that produces consistently shaped beet roots. It also has an excellent disease package against downy mildew, powdery mildew, and Rhizoctonia. Another variety we offer is the Merlin Beets which contain high sugar content which means it's one of the sweetest beet varieties you can grow in the garden. A different beet is the Touchstone Gold Beet contains orange to gold skin with a bright yellow flesh interior. This beet retains its unique gold color after harvesting and when cooked with around the homestead.