How to grow beets

What a packet calls a beet seed is botanically a fruit — a corky cluster holding two to four actual seeds fused together. Sow one and you get a tuft of seedlings from a single point on the row.

This changes what a thick row means. A gardener who sowed carefully at the recommended spacing still gets clumps, concludes they were heavy-handed, and often leaves the row alone out of embarrassment. The result is a row of leaves and marble-sized roots — beets crowded at the crown simply cannot swell.

The 1912 manual is entirely clear on this, and its explanation is the same one a modern seed catalogue gives: as a rule each seed ball contains more than one seed, and this accounts for beets coming up very thickly.

The exception worth knowing: monogerm varieties, bred originally for mechanised sugar-beet production and now sold for gardens, carry a single seed per fruit. If your packet says monogerm, sow at final spacing and skip most of the thinning. If it does not, assume clusters.

Soaking the seed overnight before sowing softens that corky fruit and speeds germination noticeably — one of the few pre-sowing rituals that reliably earns its time.

Thin gradually rather than once. Solomon's sequence is the clearest published version and works whether or not you are watering: at two to three inches tall, thin to about an inch apart. When the roots reach radish size, thin to two inches and eat the thinnings, tops and all. At golfball size, thin to four. And in a dry garden with deep open soil, a final thinning to a foot apart lets the plants run all summer.

The point of thinning in stages is that nothing is wasted and no gaps are created. Every thinning is food: beet greens at any size cook exactly like chard, and the very small ones are excellent raw.

Snip rather than pull, if the row is tight. Pulling one seedling out of a cluster disturbs the two beside it that you meant to keep.

For a household, four inches apart in rows fourteen inches apart — which is what our calendar gives — produces good eating-sized roots. Wider spacing gives larger roots, which are not better; a beet the size of a fist is usually woodier than one the size of an egg.

Beets want loose, stone-free ground for the same reason carrots do — the root has to swell, and it will deform around anything hard. They are less fussy about depth than carrots, because most of a beet sits at or above the soil surface rather than driving down.

The one real preference is pH. Beets dislike acid soil more than most vegetables and respond visibly to liming where the ground is sour, which in the maritime Northwest it usually is. If one crop in the garden is going to tell you your soil needs lime, it will be this one.

They are also the classic indicator crop for boron deficiency, which shows as dark corky patches inside the root and hollow brown areas at the crown. It is uncommon in gardens with regular compost and easy to overcorrect — boron is toxic to plants at not much above the useful dose — so confirm with a soil test before adding anything.

Water steadily. Beets are more drought-tolerant than they look, but irregular water makes tough roots with pronounced rings.

Beet and chard are the same species. Chard was selected for leaves and beet for the root, but a beet's leaves are chard leaves and cook the same way — and treating them as a by-product is how half the crop gets composted.

You can crop leaves lightly from growing plants without harming the root, as long as you take no more than about a third and never touch the growing point at the centre. Beyond that you are trading root for leaf, which is a fair trade if leaves are what you want.

The thinnings are where the real volume is. A row thinned three times produces a considerable amount of greens before a single root is lifted, and those young leaves are better than anything the mature plant offers.

This is not a modern rediscovery. Burr treats the leaf crop as ordinary, and the wartime archive in our own collection includes a 1943 USDA broadcast titled Thick and Thin about exactly this — thinning root crops and eating what you pull.

Lift when the roots are between a golf ball and a tennis ball. There is no need to wait for a size on a packet and every reason not to — larger roots go woody and develop a stronger, earthier flavour that not everybody wants.

Twist or cut the tops off about an inch above the crown rather than trimming flush. A beet cut close to the crown bleeds badly when cooked, which is why boiled beets sometimes end up pale and the water dark red. Leave the taproot on for the same reason.

Take the leaves off within an hour of lifting if you are storing the roots — leaves left on keep drawing moisture out and a bunch left overnight is noticeably softer by morning.

For keeping, layer roots in barely damp sand in a box somewhere cold and dark, not touching, exactly as for carrots. Burr describes the same method and reckons on roots holding until spring. In a mild winter you can also leave them in the ground under a thick mulch and lift as needed, which is less work and better eating.

Beets are among the least troubled crops in a home garden. Leaf miner is the commonest complaint — pale winding tunnels or blistered patches inside the leaf, made by larvae feeding between the leaf surfaces. It ruins greens and barely affects roots. Pick off affected leaves, and use row cover on a crop grown mainly for its tops.

Cercospora leaf spot appears as small round spots with pale centres in warm humid spells. It is cosmetic on a root crop; remove badly affected leaves and rotate.

Bolting happens when a young plant meets a cold spell — beets are biennial, and prolonged cold reads as winter to a seedling, which then flowers in what it believes is its second year. Sowing into soil that has warmed, rather than at the earliest possible date, is the fix.

Slugs take seedlings, as they do everywhere. Once the plants have a few true leaves the crop looks after itself.