Can anyone who has sent in seed or helped with the seed say if mangel beets/ fodder beets or sugar beets have been included at all?
Would you like a grex including them? Maybe a separate grex to not mess up the eating qualities of the other grex? Though they are certainly just as edible from all I’ve seen.
I’ve never grown beets and have alot of different varieties I’ll be growing. I’m leaning towards simplifying things and making selections towards the usual survivability, but also feeding to livestock. If no one’s interested then I’ll just do my thing but if people are interested I can plan in the fall of how many I can try to prioritize to over wintering and getting seed from next year.
I’m not the beet steward, but my preference would be to keep sugar beets (and chard) out of the GtS beet mix, since the selection criteria are very different. But for personal use, who knows? It might further your particular goals. I’ve got some adaption projects that I don’t share with GtS, and there are some GtS mixes that I don’t grow, in both cases because for those crops the goals differ, and that’s fine.
I keep thinking about getting the golden grex to grow with the GTS mix. Looks great. Anything you don’t want to send back I suppose you could replant in a different area to avoid cross pollination the second year. This will also be my first time growing beets for myself—I have seen one person’s first-year process and am trying to learn more for this year. The mangel looks interesting but I hear it doesn’t taste so good? Maybe you could breed one that tastes better..
I think that’s a really interesting project and I want to do a similar one as well. Beets grow so well for me and never have pest problems so being able to use them as food for us and food for chickens/pigs would be ideal.
Regarding a GTS mix with mangel and sugar beets (I’m not the steward) I would think probably this would be a separate mix because of two factors:
Taste. Sugar beets and mangels taste very different from regular table beets and many ppl may not want the flavour contamination.
GMO contamination. I’m not sure if this is a problem everywhere but sugar beets are a commercial crop and getting certified non-gmo sugar beet seeds can sometimes be a problem.
Anyways just my thoughts on the matter. Good luck with your beet project!
Did you see the BEET - 2026 European Focus Crops and Creating a Beet Grex 2026? Maybe there’s some input to inspire this project. And perhaps further down the line we could find a way to exchange genetics so both gene pools could benefit.