Beets certainly aren’t everyone’s favorite vegetable, but they pack a nutritious punch and provide both greens and roots that are edible. On top of this they are easy to pickle and preserve as well as freezer tolerant which can help make them an easy garden staple.
- Family: Chenopodiaceae
- Growing Season: Early spring OR late fall for warm climates, late spring OR early fall for cold climates.
- Growing Zones: 3 through 10
- Spacing: 12 inches (30 cm) apart
- Seed to Harvest time: plant as seeds, harvest in 50 to 60 days
- Indoor Starting: Not recommended for root vegetables
- Earliest Planting: As soon as ground can be worked
- Watering: Water when soil is dry, keeping soil moist, but never wet. Do not over water.
- Sunlight Requirements: Full sun to partial shade
- Planting: plant seeds 1/2 inch (0.6 cm) deep keeping spacing in mind.
- Weeding: For any root vegetable weeding is critical to developing strong healthy roots for harvest, weed daily if possible.
- Harvesting: Harvest greens when they are 4 to 5 inches long (10-13 cm). Harvest roots when they are roughly 1-3 inches (2.5-8 cm) wide. Roots can be harvested by lightly digging around the base with your hands then pulling straight up.
- Known Pests: Leaf miners, should be removed by hand and checked often once spotted.
- Known Problems: Leaf spots can occur if water sits on leaves, try to water the soil rather than the plant themselves. Too much nitrogen to can leaves to overdevelop while roots remain stunted, do not add additional nitrogen to your soil after first compost if this is a problem for you.
More About Beets
Beets are a highly versatile vegetable. Being something where you can choose to harvest both roots and greens certainly helps make these a garden staple. Their rich color can also be extracted and used as a fabric or food dye.
Beets are easy to grow, but have different planting times and requirements depending on the zone you are in. While this shouldn’t surprise you, beets are a little more unusual than most plants as they can be a spring or fall crop quite easily in most places. This flexibility add to their appeal for homestead gardeners.
The biggest value that beets add to any homestead is their ability to keep well. You can can, pickle, freeze or dry store beets to increase their shelf life. Being so easy to keep for long periods of time you can really make a good store of food from a few beet harvests. Beet greens also freeze quite well and are great in many dishes that need a little bit of something extra.
Beet Tasting and Food Notes
Beets are both rich and earthy as well as sweet. While their a somewhat distinct flavor once you get used to eating them, they have a lot of the same flavors that other fibrous root vegetables do. This flavor, when cooked, can border on floral, but often is more of a mild earthy sweetness.
Pickled beets have a strong and pronounced taste that develops in the pickling process. These are great for salads, paired with tuna or chicken, and even great for sandwiches.
Outside of the pickled realm beets are most famously known for their use to make soup (borscht). While beet soup is a lot of beets, people tend to take it further and use them for smoothies and dips too. So if you like beets you can really make them the start of the dish easily.
Beets are also used as a flavoring agent for other foods quite frequently. Beet pickled eggs is a common example where hard boiled eggs are then pickled with beets. The beet flavors soak into the cooked egg and impart a lovely color as well as a semi-sweet zingy taste. If you want to be even fancy you can roll your eggs to crack the shells, but don’t peel them. After pickling this way you will get the same great flavors, but the peeled eggs will have a beautiful crackled texture over their surface from where the shell acted as a resist to the dye.
Beet greens are a fantastic green to use in salads, but they really shine when cooked. Diced into scrambled eggs, mixed into pasta, or tossed into a stir fry they always retain their flavor and hold up textural integrity better than things like spinach.
Both the roots and the greens can also be prepared simply roasted, sauteed, or boiled even.
Should I Grow Beets?
If you like beets even a little bit they are a winner for your garden. Not only do they keep well, they have so many uses and can take on so many forms. Being able to use them as both sides and main dishes pushes them from a nice to have to a near essential vegetable to grow if you’re a homesteader. They not only grow most places, but they also are incredibly quick to grow at only 50-60 days seed to harvest.
The only real downside to beets is their space requirements. The 12 inch spacing can be a bit much if you tight on growing area, but even just having a raised bed or two with them can be worth it. So if you’re able to, we’d really recommend you spare some space for beets in your own garden.