Nice to see participants sharing stories about their beets. You can read about my beet project so far here: Long Colorful Beets for flavor.
I’m still learning a lot about the potentials in beet, so I’m interested in focusing on genetic diversity, before my own criteria get more specific. And I think that our wider community in Europe could benefit a lot from having seed with higher adaptability, so I’d like to put that front and center.
Making a grex together
A place our community could begin raising the bar with beets is to make one highly diverse grex that all our members could benefit from. To my knowledge, I don’t think we have such a thing. Are you up for making that one of our projects?
This winter we could acquire as much diverse and interesting beet seed. We buy the seed and have it sent to one of us. That person mixes the seeds and then send individual packets to all participants. The coming season, we grow that mix out, perhaps along with any GTS-grown seed we already have. At the end of the year, we save a decent amount of beets to grow out for a cross-pollinated grex in 2027. Half of the seed, each individual growers keep for themself (as there was already some local adaptation when the initial mix was grown out), the other half is sent to one person, who once more mixes all the seed into a highly diverse GTS beet grex.
This doesn’t prevent us from doing other things together to increase our seed and raise the bar, e.g. I assume several of us have already roots stored for growing to seed in 2026 that we can also focus on pooling at the end of the season.
What do you say?
Turning on notifications
We are currently 8 participants in the beet group: @mare.silba @malterod @Bore, @Saskia, @jackpeppiatt, @Jacek, @Anita Great! To help us work focused together, I suggest turning on notifications for this thread by default. You do that in the lower right corner. It’s up to you of course, whatever works to get you tuned in.