GARDENING REPORT: Planting Beets

It's time once again for our Garden Report with Julie Riley from the Cooperative Extension Service. Tonight Julie will give you tips on how to plant beets for the upcoming summer.

It's time to finish up planting and this year I'd like you to give beets a chance. If you think that beets taste like Earth, you're right! Beets produce a substance called geosmin. Geosmin is also produced by a cell living bacteria that gives that characteristic earthy smell when you first turn over the soil in the spring.

So if this earthiness is something that you like, there are a couple of varieties that have more geosmin than others.​

The candy striped giada and the other variety "Bulls Blood". You get these locally at the seed racks.​

Now, there's one critical piece of information that gardeners tend to overlook, and that is each beet seed is actually a cluster of more than one seed.​

Sometimes it is difficult to tell that more than one plant has come up. So, one of these you are gently going to pull them apart, and one of these has got to go.

So this summer give beets a chance. You've got until the first part of July to put beets in the ground. Fill in any of those bare spots where you have harvested your arugula or radishes.

I'm Julie Riley, join me next week for Garden Report when we talk about lilacs.