Beet Landrace Struggles

I’m trying to do a beet landrace and having a lot of trouble getting seedlings to live. I’m direct seeding with about 8 different varieties, including a 3 root grex. In my first and earliest planting last November I had a few come up and make a few true leaves. Then in December we had a very hard freeze and it killed them all. The next planting had a lot come up but they have all disappeared and died. I know some say beets require a slightly basic pH and I do not know my soil’s pH.
I am considering planting them in galleon pots with compost and if they come up and get some size I will plant them in the ground.
Another option is to plant them in an area of the garden that has richer soil from the years of organic matter.
We are also having some frosts every few weeks. Is it too cold for the seedlings?
The goal is to get tubers this year so that I can make crosses next year so getting any plants that far would be great.
Any suggestions are appreciated.

I treat beets as semi-hardy. Therefore I wait to plant them until about the time that the apple trees are flowering.

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How cold are your frosts? I know your climate is so different from mine. My beets, like Joseph’s, do ok if planted during light frost season but I wouldn’t want more than a couple degrees below freezing for the babies, and not anything that froze the surface of the soil solid for more than a day or two.

Apples flower for me about the first week of May. By that time, the ecosystem is vibrantly green. There will be about 3 more weeks of very light frosts.

Beets planted around June 1st thrive, if kept watered long enough for them to germinate.

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It has been really unpredictable these past two years. I think I just got unlucky this year with really bad freeze during Christmas. The low was around the low-teens for two nights and it didn’t get above freezing one day. Last year it was very mild up until the middle of March and we had a hard freeze which hurt a lot of things I planted early. Our usual frost are in the high 20s or hovering around 32.


The freeze this Christmas was so bad it defoliated all our citrus trees and made the fruit inedible. That has not happened in my lifetime but I think it did a long time ago and destroyed more northern citrus groves. We probably won’t get any fruit next year because of this.

Then I will wait until the 2nd week of March here. That’s around our last frost date. My main concern is that it gets too hot for them too quickly and I wanted to start early. It’s been in the high 70s this week and feels like spring. The plums are blooming but I think it will freeze a few more times because this is unusual.

I don’t know what the issue with beets is in my garden. From what I understand they are the exact same species as chard and chard grows wonderfully all season long, even when it’s hot and without watering. Beets on the other hand just kind of struggle along at best.

One thing chard has never done for me is survive winter. We got hit by the same cold snap as you just before Christmas except our low was -14 F and stayed below zero for the next 24 hours or so. It stayed below freezing for a few more days after that, with less dramatic lows around or slightly below zero for three or four days. I have six or seven chard plants, alive and doing quite well, I ain’t got a clue how that happened.

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Ooof. I’m still waiting to see what our prolonged -40 did this fall, before snow cover. These weather events are a lot. And those poor citrus!

Hopefully you can baby this set of beets along until they give you an abundance of seed, and then if you feel like you can step-start them for both cold and heat resistance later on when you can afford to lose the majority of them.

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Wow, those are some hardy chards! Do you save seed from your chard? It’s good to hear they do well in the heat. That freeze did a lot of selection for me with other crops.

-40 is crazy. I was thinking the same about snow. If we had snow (which we never do) it probably would not have been so bad. I think I will do a mix of both planting now and babying with protection and compost, and planting closer to our last frost like Joseph suggested.

-40 is crazy! On the plus side, this land has never in the history of its humans had to endure +40C. :laughing:

Fingers crossed for your beets, both starting and finishing!

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I would love to save seed from chard but have never had it survive winter before. Always before less severe temperatures have killed it. The seed was a mix of kinds but all just fresh from the catalogs last spring. If it makes it the rest of winter, which right now it looks like it might, I will most certainly be saving seed.

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Did you get the mixed seeds in the Fukuoka seed pack? I contributed all of my beet seeds, which came from three beets that I planted in October 2021, which survived my zone 7b winter, and then flowered produced seeds for me in spring and summer 2022. There were a total of twenty-five of small plants that were growing in October and only three survived, so those three might be hardier than is typical.

I’ve decided I don’t really like the dirt flavor of beets, so I contributed all of mine to the Fukuoka packet, but I’m now thinking that was very stupid of me, because I could have saved some to share with other people in my neighborhood who do like beets.

I’m just leaving this here for @UnicornEmily to read.

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Ooooh. That sounds really interesting. I like the sweet flavor of beets; it’s the dirt aftertaste I don’t like. I’ve wondered if there were any beet varieties that would work for me.

Have you grown that variety?

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I don’t remember seeing any beet seed in my Fukuoka packet. I planted all of it bc most of the seeds in the packet were cool weather for me. I’ll keep an eye out for any beet seedlings.

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I have not grown it, I just remembered the description when you mentioned beet flavour.

My fukuoka packet was all very tiny seeds, nothing even the size of a mustard seed let alone beet. Now I’m even more curious about what’s in it!

That’s crazy! Must have gotten the bottom of the barrel. I had some huge sunflower seeds, some calendula seeds, some kind of lily it looked like. It was a lot of variety.

This is a sign I need to get over my anxiety about tiny seeds. Maybe I have tobacco in there? That would be really special.

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