I'm Ron Patterson with Utah State University Extension in Carbon County.
Today we're going to cover how to plant beets.
They're pretty easy to handle, and they do well in our high elevation climates in Utah.
You can usually plant beets early May, maybe late April, and they'll do fairly well in...in
the higher elevations.
You get down around the Wasatch Front, and you'll probably want to maybe plant them middle
April, or maybe even early April.
But they do quite well; they're fairly hardy plants and they'll pop up pretty good - they're
not nearly as tender as the carrots are - but they do well.
You can plant beets in a wide row or you can plant them in a single row and I'll show you
a couple of ways of doing each one.
When you do beets in a row, it's really simple, you just take a hoe, and make a furrow.
Now if you wanted, you could plant beets several rows very close together, making a wide row
system in rows, and that's one way you can do beets.
This year has been a very dry year, throughout the winter and the spring, and it's important
to have that moisture in your furrow so that the seeds will have that activation to get
them germinating.
You can that my furrows are very...very dry here, so we're going to trickle some water
in there and get a good wetting down in my furrows.
If you have a really wet spring you may not need to do this, but in our country we never
have what's call a wet spring, so I always make sure I got plenty of moisture to begin
with.
Then I don't have to worry about watering the seeds up; they should pop up pretty good
with just having this water here in the furrow.
The seeds should germinate - if your soil temperature's up at a good soil temperature
- your seeds should germinate within ten days, two weeks at the most, so hopefully you won't
have to water them again before they pop up out.
If you do, you want to be kinda careful you don't wash things away but beets are pretty
tough - they can pop through a little bit of a crust like we get formed here in our...in
our clay-y type soils.
We can still have those beets pop up through, but if you can avoid have to water after you've
planted until the seedlings have popped up, then you're going to be better off.
Now beets are also a very good root and a leaf crop; the leaves are a delicious treat
as well as the root, so that you can bottle the root, you can eat them fresh, you can
eat them pickled, and the leaves are also very good and very nutritious.
The seeds are kind of a...a conglomerate of seeds actually - that's more than one seed
- so even though you think you've spread them out, they will kind of come up in a cluster.
So we'll kind of plant these fairly loose, thin across here - not real heavy - and just
kind of plant them in there.
Scatter them down each row.
One more row to do.
Finish off this package.
All right, so we've got our seed in the furrow and just cover them over...about a quarter
of an inch is all you need; maybe a little bit more, they're a little hardier than the
carrots are.
About a quarter of an inch on top of your seed, and then you want to kind of pat the
ground down; get a good contact between the soil and the seed.
And hopefully we won't have to water this again until we've got some seedlings popping
up.
So there we've got them planted in furrows, and I'll show you how we can do it in another...in
a wider bed.
Now for making a...just a wide row, we can use a rake - the backside of a rake - and
rake that right out and get us a wide bed.
I try to keep mine within about a foot wide or so, depending on how long I want my bed.
I'm going to make this...try to make it level so my water will pool and soak down into the
soil.
All right now you'll notice that this bed is still pretty dry, so I need to make sure
I've got water in it; try to make it fairly level so the water will evenly in soak in
to the whole area.
Because it's so dry, if I can get a half inch of water or so sitting in that puddle, it'll
soak down at least six inches into the soil.
So now we'll let that water soak down and we'll plant some more beet seeds.
Okay the water's soaked down in here pretty good, so all we need to do is grab a few beet
seeds and scatter them out over the area.
It doesn't take a lot; one package of beet seeds will last a normal family several years.
So kinda scatter those out; if you think your seeds are a little bit old or something you
might put a little bit extra in there.
You can always thin them out if you plant too heavy, and then we'll cover them up.
Okay, so now I've got it scattered out; cover it up -again about a quarter inch over the
seed.
Pat it down so you've got good seed soil contact, with that seed in contact with that moist
soil.
That's really all it takes, so now you're ready to go have some fun in your garden.