-Baxter County Master Gardeners-
  • About Master Gardeners
    • National Mission Statement
    • UAEX - Univ of AR Extension Service >
      • Baxter County Extension Office
      • The UA Cooperative Extension Service
      • UAEX Master Gardener Program
    • Baxter County Gov't >
      • County Extension Council
      • County Extension Service
    • Our Structure, Rules & Guidelines >
      • 2022 Org Chart
      • Bylaws
      • Standing Rules
      • Duties, Projects & Events
      • New Member Orientation
      • Continuing Education & Training
      • Member Status
      • Apply Online
      • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Events & Outreach
    • Calendar of Events
    • Join Us At Our Meeting
    • Radio Program
    • Monthly Newsletter
    • Spring Seminar
    • Annual Plant Sale
    • Farmers Market
    • Fair Horticulture Room
    • Public Education Booths
    • Hatchery Outdoor Adventure
    • Scholarship
  • Garden Projects
    • Fairgrounds Garden
    • Bull Shoals
    • Clysta Willett
    • Cooper Park
    • Fish Hatchery
    • Extension Office
    • Memorial Gardens
    • Library Pollinator Garden
  • Gardening Tips
    • Bringing Nature into your Garden >
      • Native Plant Finder (research by Doug Tallamy, PhD)
      • Creating a Landscape With Native Plants
      • Native Drought-Tolerant Plants
      • Well-Behaved Natives
      • Native Alternatives to Invasive Plants
    • Invasive Plants >
      • Invasive Plants to Avoid
      • Invasive Non-Natives
    • Seminar Horticulture Table
    • DIY Projects
  • Members Only
    • Enter Your Hours
    • Buddy Message Blog
    • MG Roster
    • MG Meeting Minutes
    • Treasurer Reports - 2019 >
      • Treasurer Reports - 2018
      • Treasurer Reports - 2017
      • Treasurer Reports - 2016
      • Treasurer Reports 2015
      • Treasurer Reports 2014
    • Forms
    • How-To >
      • Webmaster Duties
      • Website Editing Guide
      • Website Updating Duties
    • Practice Pages >
      • RoseMatta
      • Rose's Roster
      • Annual Plant Sale
      • JanelleStookey
      • MikeKuenzli
      • JanHalligan
      • PennyWells
      • Clysta Willett
      • SusanChamberlain
      • Memorial Gardens
      • Kathleen -Fairgrounds Garden
      • Practice - Cooper Park
      • Judy - Extension Office
Ozark Green Thumb
BCMG Monthly e-Newsletter
                                                     Signup to receive
 our free monthly e-newsletter, 
   Ozark Green Thumb.  

Beets

4/7/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
I grew up eating beets, but only the pickled kind from the Mason jars my mother canned in considerable quantity.  Nowadays I can’t pass them by at a salad bar where they seem to have taken up permanent residence.  Since my youth I’ve encountered stewed beets -- OK but not great-- and on a trip to Russia, borscht, which quickly became a favorite.  Beets (Beta vulgaris), though a humble root vegetable, have an interesting history.

Beets have been domesticated about 4,000 years, probably first brought into cultivation as a leafy green around the Mediterranean basin. The plant has long been classified as belonging to the chenopod family, the same family to which spinach belongs, but new classification schemes using DNA data have moved this whole family into the amaranth family. Chard, a leafy selection of the beet, seems to have been displaced as a common greens crop by spinach when it became more widely grown.
​Beet plants are biennial herbs that are usually grown as annuals. They form a large inflated tap root and leafy rosette of leaves that bolt in the early summer of the second season and produce a tall growing stem containing insignificant clusters of small flowers on 6-foot tall stems.  From the gardener’s perspective, if the plant ever bolts and produces flowers, the optimum time for harvest has been missed.
Taxonomically four principle subsets of this species are recognized; 1) chard which is grown for its edible leaves and does not produce a tap root, 2) mangel-wurzel, a beet root developed as a wintertime fodder for cattle 3) sugar beets for sucrose production and 4) table beets which, while primarily seen in bright red, are also available in golden yellow and white forms. 
The red/purple pigment associated with beetroot is from various betalains, water soluble pigments formed from an indole based pathway that are found in plants in the Caryophyllales order. This category of plant classification is an umbrella group housing many seemingly unrelated plant families such as cacti and beets. However, because beets, cacti and amaranth all have betalin pigments, logic dictates they must descent from some common ancestor that produced this kind of color pigment instead of the more common, but completely chemically unrelated anthocyanin pigment, found in other plants with red flowers or leaves. ​
The red/purple pigment associated with beetroot is from various betalains, water soluble pigments formed from an indole based pathway that are found in plants in the Caryophyllales order. This category of plant classification is an umbrella group housing many seemingly unrelated plant families such as cacti and beets. However, because beets, cacti and amaranth all have betalin pigments, logic dictates they must descent from some common ancestor that produced this kind of color pigment instead of the more common, but completely chemically unrelated anthocyanin pigment, found in other plants with red flowers or leaves. ​
Red table beets were taken to northern Europe during the years of Roman occupation where, until the 17th century they were known as “Roman beets.” Both the beetroot and the tops are edible with the leaves either cooked similar to spinach or eaten fresh as salad greens. They arrived in America with the earliest settlers but never gained much prominence as a crop until the middle years of the 18th century when a German scientist discovered that the sugar found in beets and sugar cane, sucrose, was the same. 
​
Ordinary table beets contain 2 to 6 percent sucrose but selection efforts quickly elevated the sugar beet sugar content to about 10 percent. The French, during the English-imposed blockade which stopped cane sugar shipments during the Napoleonic Wars, were the first to take advantage of this newly developed technology and opened the first sugar beet extraction plant in 1802. Sugar beets were imported to the United States in the 1830’s with the first extraction plant opening in California in 1879. Over the next century and a half the world supply of sugar has equaled out with half coming from cane and half from beets. ​
Beets are easy to grow in the vegetable garden. Plant the seeds about 1.5 inches apart in a row about a month before the last frost date.  Beet seed is actually a cluster of seeds bound together in a naturally occurring seed ball, so after emergence, seedlings should be thinned to 1.5 inches apart. Multiple plantings at four-week intervals will ensure continual production through the year. Beetroots continue to enlarge as long as they remain in the ground, but roots of a usable size can usually be produced in 60 to 70 days.
By: Gerald Klingaman, retired 
Retired Extension Horticulturist - Ornamentals
Extension News - May 31, 2013
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016

Picture
​Have a garden question or comment?...
Email us

​Check out our Facebook page

​Website trouble?... 
Email the webmaster
  • About Master Gardeners
    • National Mission Statement
    • UAEX - Univ of AR Extension Service >
      • Baxter County Extension Office
      • The UA Cooperative Extension Service
      • UAEX Master Gardener Program
    • Baxter County Gov't >
      • County Extension Council
      • County Extension Service
    • Our Structure, Rules & Guidelines >
      • 2022 Org Chart
      • Bylaws
      • Standing Rules
      • Duties, Projects & Events
      • New Member Orientation
      • Continuing Education & Training
      • Member Status
      • Apply Online
      • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Events & Outreach
    • Calendar of Events
    • Join Us At Our Meeting
    • Radio Program
    • Monthly Newsletter
    • Spring Seminar
    • Annual Plant Sale
    • Farmers Market
    • Fair Horticulture Room
    • Public Education Booths
    • Hatchery Outdoor Adventure
    • Scholarship
  • Garden Projects
    • Fairgrounds Garden
    • Bull Shoals
    • Clysta Willett
    • Cooper Park
    • Fish Hatchery
    • Extension Office
    • Memorial Gardens
    • Library Pollinator Garden
  • Gardening Tips
    • Bringing Nature into your Garden >
      • Native Plant Finder (research by Doug Tallamy, PhD)
      • Creating a Landscape With Native Plants
      • Native Drought-Tolerant Plants
      • Well-Behaved Natives
      • Native Alternatives to Invasive Plants
    • Invasive Plants >
      • Invasive Plants to Avoid
      • Invasive Non-Natives
    • Seminar Horticulture Table
    • DIY Projects
  • Members Only
    • Enter Your Hours
    • Buddy Message Blog
    • MG Roster
    • MG Meeting Minutes
    • Treasurer Reports - 2019 >
      • Treasurer Reports - 2018
      • Treasurer Reports - 2017
      • Treasurer Reports - 2016
      • Treasurer Reports 2015
      • Treasurer Reports 2014
    • Forms
    • How-To >
      • Webmaster Duties
      • Website Editing Guide
      • Website Updating Duties
    • Practice Pages >
      • RoseMatta
      • Rose's Roster
      • Annual Plant Sale
      • JanelleStookey
      • MikeKuenzli
      • JanHalligan
      • PennyWells
      • Clysta Willett
      • SusanChamberlain
      • Memorial Gardens
      • Kathleen -Fairgrounds Garden
      • Practice - Cooper Park
      • Judy - Extension Office