Beta vulgaris.

Biennial plant, open pollinated. 

What’s to say? If you’re a beet lover, you’re probably well acquainted with the Detroit red. Especially if you’re into canning beets! It is an old heirloom, all purpose: fresh eating, storage, and canning. The red beet of beets. 

Days to maturity: 60 days. 

50 seeds per pack. 

Here’s a quote from the first page of a book titled Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins.

“The beet is the most intense of vegetables. 

The radish, admittedly, is ore feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious. 

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smouldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets. 

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip… 

The beet is the murdered returned to the seen of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin’s favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.

In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mange-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t——-

Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole-and when you aren’t sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.)

An old Ukrainian proverb warns, 'A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.'

That is a risk we have to take."

Seed starting

I recommend direct seeding in the garen, as soon as the soil can be worked. Sow 1/2inch deep. Beets are hardy and can tolerate a light frost. For a good size yield, thin to 3” apart between roots (you can eat the small beets / beet greens as you thin). Sow every two weeks for a continuous supply.