I’m asking for help with this one. I have had pretty good success overwintering most biennials in my zone6 garden–turnips, cabbages, collards, carrots have all worked and given me seeds. I can’t, for the life of me, however, get beets to make it through the winter. The coldest winter temperature I’ve recorded in the past 8 years was -7 degrees Fahrenheit. Does anyone have advice on how to get beets to survive the cold to make seed? I don’t have a root cellar. I am hoping, eventually, to have a cold-hardy beet that doesn’t need pampering and sticks around for the spring. As it stands right now, I’ve never been able to harvest beet seeds, ever. Any advice is greatly appreciated.
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Swiss chard is the same species as beets… I’ve had good luck overwintering that. You could put row cover over your beets, and that will probably get them thru the winter. Once you get seeds from them, and I’m talking about a substantial quantity like one or two gallon size freezer bags of seed, you can do a mass sowing and probably will get some survivors without using row cover.
In general, if the plant survival rate is low, then you need to boost the numbers of seeds. So if one in one thousand survive, I’d say you need at least one hundred thousand seeds in order to get what you need. You can bump up your seed count by somewhat coddling your first generation, as with row cover. Then, keep adding genetics on an ongoing basis to prevent inbreeding depression.
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Have you tried covering the beets with mulch?
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I have tried mulching, Malte, but our winters just get too cold I suppose. I appreciate the thoughts, Brent. I don’t have the space for thousands of beet plants. I’m just a one-person show with hand tools out here, so I’ve got to figure out one-person hand-tool solutions, which I probably should have said in the beginning. The idea of a gallon freezer size bag of beet seeds seems like a dream, but I haven’t even been able to save ONE seed, haha! Maybe someday.
It does sound like a root cellar or similar structure is what you would need to grow beets. In my country, people used to make a “kule” which was basically a deep hole in the ground where you put roots and other things to keep over winter. Then you put straw and soil on top. The ground insulates the roots. You have to dig somewhere where the water table doesnt reach it in winter and if you have voles and mice, ylh need to protect it against them. I am sure there are similar low-tech structures in your region.
There is alot of videos on people burying old fridges or chest freezers. Burying barrels, which get covered with square bales or something. Deep trench, layers of leaves/straw and root crops, covered in mulch/straw and then square bales on top too.
We get dang cold here. I’m working on ideas of what would work as a root cellar that isn’t quite as much undertaking as a full root cellar.
I don’t have a huge space either. I don’t plant rows; I scatter-sow a bed thickly and let natural selection do the thinning. No irrigation. At first there are many crowded seedlings but over time they do thin out to the strongest ones.