I have saved seed from beets I’ve selected for taste since a year or two and want to document my journey here.
My criteria are:
Fast-growing. I want them to quickly compete with weeds. If I want small beets for some reason, I can just harvest them earlier at that stage. If I want large beets, I just wait. When I save roots at the end of the season, I will thus select the biggest ones, assuming they were the healthiest and fastest growing.
Flavor. To be explored more. Beets have a polarizing “earthy bitterness” that some like and some don’t. I wonder if there is a part of that earthiness that could be decreased while containing the part of it that makes beets interesting and not just sweet.
Rainbow colors. I love them in all the colors: yellow, red, striped, white and my chef students especially love the combinations of them like Chioggia beets with a lighter pink red instead of white stripe.
First year of selecting for flavor with students. We did this really ad hoc in September 2024.
The most important learning I had was a bit embarrassing in hindsight: Remember to peel the beets before tasting! We discovered that bitterness really sits mainly in the peel of the root. After tasting more than a handful of beets with peel, you start to get a slight burning sensation in your mouth that is not very pleasant. (I am grateful that I did this test with 1st year student)
One thing I did right, which I learned from tasting carrots, is to use a mandoline. You can make lots of thin slices so more people can taste and still save a sufficient amount of the root for seed if it passes the test.
Next learning is that while raw tasting can give you supplementary insight, it really does make sense to lightly cook the beets before selecting for flavor. 95% of the time, we will use beets cooked. And in the other cases, they will almost always be “cold cooked” by some kind of acid as when you put them in vinegar. So next time, I will slice beets and then steam them for about 5 minutes in the oven, before tasting.
Of course, the students have to finish it off by getting creative and making a dish of their own design where beets play a central role. This is always very fun and after talking and tasting roots for an hour, they have lots of ideas.
One student finished her first half year of chef school by saying that this was her favorite day of the entire course and she instantly went home to buy more beets and book with them in her kitchen. I love this story!
Out of interest, did you leave them in the ground to go for seed next year? Your winters are so much milder than mine that it seems like most obvious choice. I’m not sure how they would survive here and last years the survivor plot, where I could leave them in the ground, they haven’t grown so haven’t really been able to test it. But storing them over winter also failed (they were alive, but didn’t establish) which is why I’m interested if you stored them or overwintered in the ground? Next year I gotta try with the seeds that I have in the same area where I had carrots grow well to see if big roots would overwinter. If it’s successful I could piggy back on your work the next year. Beets is one of my favority root vegetable by taste and it doesn’t have really any other problems than animals very much like to eat it too. That’s just matter of fencing or covering. Just keeping them alive over winter is whats holding me back.
I saved the best beets from 2024 to grow for seed and had some big, beautiful inflorescences coming up in the summer that soon after got repeatedly eaten by wildlife, I think esp. deer. This is my first year growing at this new location and I have been spoiled by fences. The deer seem to particularly like the above-ground part of my beets, incl. all the Swiss chard that failed for that reason.
I probably got measly 10-15 seeds, all of them pretty small, at the end of the season.
As for growing, while the deer also ate the leaves of the beets throughout the season, I was surprised to get a crop in spite of that. They are far from large! But they seem to be able to pull through and some roots have potential.
Started in spring in plugs and planted out 30th of June. Harvested these 20th of October.
Personally I think some are even too sweet (hence sugar beets have been bred from them). Especially the white fleshed seem too sweet without any other flavours. Suppose I like the earthy flavour, although I don’t see it as earthy that much. Just good beet flavour.
Out of interest, did you leave them in the ground to go for seed next year?
Yes, I did just replant them shortly after taste selection, so October last year. I made sure to cover them a little bit, but expected a few of them might die from frosts. Usually, enough of them survive.
This year I might overwinter them frost-free in a shed at least for some of the winter because there might be a tractor going through the field to dig up some bushes.
I am also considering to replant the beets somewhere that is safe from deer pressure. Of course, as you say, I could also just make a small fence around my “seed garden” area.
