Beets are loaded with nutrients
and are absolutely delicious. In today's episode lets look at growing beets. So the best way to start beets is to direct
sow them. 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 We hope you enjoyed this episode, give us
a thumbs up if you liked this video and we will see you again soon Happy gardening!