Tried and tasted... beetroot

Beetroot is probably one of the easiest vegetables to grow and most allotment and back garden veg growers will give it a try, usually as one of the first crops they sow. It is a great crop to help all of us get started into a new gardening year; seeds can be sown from March to May but as you’ll see below, we can also sow them successfully later in the season.

For the beetroot trial on my plot in Yorkshire seven popular varieties were chosen to be tried and tasted; some are old favourites, some are new ones. I also wanted to see how the different varieties performed when sown later in the year.

The varieties grown were ‘Crimson King’ (Kings), ‘Pablo’ (widely available), ‘Action’ (Marshalls, Dobies), ‘Detroit Globe’ (widely available), ‘Moneta’ (Johnsons, Kings, Plants of Distinction’, Suttons), ‘Monika’ (Johnsons, D T Brown, Marshalls) and ‘Boltardy’ (widely available). These are all round, red beetroot, but there are a number of coloured beet varieties available and I hope to bring you a trial on these in the near future.

Growing the crop

Beetroot, like all root vegetables, will thrive on land which has been well manured and worked for a previous crop and which is also well drained and moisture retentive. I like to grow mine on soil which previously grew potatoes. The area chosen had been well dressed with manure, and leafmould made mainly from beech leaves from the trees bordering my plot and lime was added to bring the pH up to around neutral (pH7) using garden lime.

Sowing: The normal time to sow beetroot is in March or April. It is important to make a fine seedbed for sowing and this can be easily achieved by treading the area on the first ‘drying day’ in spring (the first day on which the soil can be seen to be turning from wet and claggy to dry and crumbly).

Walking slowly over the soil keeping your feet close together crumbles the clods that have not been broken down by the frost, snow and rain following winter digging and also settles to soil in preparation for sowng. When digging the land after cropping potatoes it is important to ensure that any ‘volunteers’ (tubers or bits of tubers missed and left buried) are removed before sowing your seeds. Self-set potatoes can easily outgrow the beetroot seedlings and start to disturb and compete with them.

The beetroot trial was sown 45cm (18in) apart in shallow drills 2.5cm (1in) deep as thinly as possible. Sowing too thickly means much root disturbance when thinning out later and developing seedlings need room to grow.

Some modern varieties such as ‘Moneta’ and ‘Monika’ are classed as monogerm types and this means that only one seedling will germinate from each seed (a beetroot seed as it comes from the seed packet is really a little cluster of seeds). Traditional varieties however, such as ‘Pablo’, will produce a cluster of two or more seedlings from each ‘seed’ making thinning out a little more difficult.

June-sown beetroot

I also sowed a row of each variety on June 17 and germination was very good. At the time of sowing this batch the soil was dry so the base of the drill was watered prior to sowing the seeds and pulling back dry soil to cover the seeds after sowing. This seals in the moisture around the seeds and aids germination. The only time this trial was watered subsequently was after thinning out.

Trial results

The roots were harvested according to the size recommended by the Royal Horticultural Society’s Judging Manual which says the perfect size for beetroot is about the size of a cricket ball. All scores are out of 10. These results are taken from the March-sown batch, but the June plants produced very similar results and if anything, the germination may have been a little better...

• To see the full trial results see Kitchen Garden magazine, March 2012