How to Grow and Care for Beets

Beets are among the fastest and least demanding vegetables you can grow, and they fail for one reason more than all others combined.

Every beet seed is several seeds

What you plant as a beet “seed” is not a seed. It is a seedball — a dried fruit containing two to four actual seeds — so a single sown “seed” comes up as a tight clump of seedlings all competing for the same space.

That is why Michigan State Extension identifies the failure directly: the most common problem growing beets is not thinning the planting.

Unthinned beets produce leaves and no root. The tops look healthy, you wait, and at the end you pull up a handful of stringy fingers. There is no way around it and no variety that fixes it, other than the “monogerm” types bred for single seeds, which are uncommon in home seed packets.

Sowing and thinning

Sow the seed ½ inch deep, about 2 inches apart, in rows 10 to 30 inches apart.

Thin when the seedlings are 3 to 4 inches tall, to 2 to 3 inches between plants. Some sources push that to 3 to 4 inches apart for larger roots.

Thin by snipping the surplus seedlings off at soil level with scissors rather than pulling them. Pulling disturbs the roots of the one you are keeping, which are already tangled together in the same seedball.

The thinnings are worth eating — beet seedlings are excellent in salad, which makes the job less painful.

Soil

Loose, well-drained, loamy or sandy soil in full sun. MSU notes that hard clay soils prevent root enlargement — the root physically cannot swell against compacted ground, and you get the same disappointing result as poor thinning.

If your soil is heavy, grow beets in a raised bed or work in plenty of organic matter first. Remove stones, which cause forked and distorted roots.

Timing, and why cool weather matters

Beets are a cool-season crop, best sown in spring and again in late summer for a fall harvest.

MSU makes a point worth knowing: cool temperatures produce the best red colour. Beets grown through summer heat are paler, and often have more pronounced white zoning inside. The fall crop is usually the better one for both colour and sweetness.

Harvest

About 50 to 60 days for most varieties, and the optimal size for harvest is around 1½ inches in diameter.

That is smaller than most people wait for. Beets left to grow large turn woody and lose sweetness, and the gain in bulk is not worth the loss in quality. Pull them young, and sow again rather than letting a crop stand.

Do not waste the tops — beet greens are excellent cooked, and are the same plant as chard in all but selection.

Internal black spot: the boron problem

If you cut a beet open and find hard dark patches or corky black areas inside an otherwise healthy-looking root, that is internal black spot, and it is a boron deficiency.

MSU notes beets develop it when soil boron is inadequate, and that boron plays an essential role in cell wall formation and sugar movement. The soils most often short of it are sandy soils, organic soils, and fine-textured lake-bed soils.

Two cautions before you act. Boron is needed in very small amounts and the margin between sufficient and toxic is narrow, so do not apply it speculatively — get a soil test first. And over-application damages a wide range of crops, not just the beets.

The short version

Sow half an inch deep and two inches apart in loose soil and full sun, then thin, properly, to two or three inches once seedlings reach three or four inches tall — that one job decides the crop. Harvest at about an inch and a half across, around 50 to 60 days. Grow the main crop in cool weather for the best colour, and if you find black patches inside, soil-test for boron before adding any.