Lorraine Hughes
This past spring and into the early days of summer this is what I was exclaiming from my vegetable garden. I planted beets in the same patch I had a bumper crop last year and alas disappointment has been my companion this year in the beet department. Either they did not come up at all or they sprouted and never got any bigger. I posed my questions to the ladies at the community garden and mostly what I got was shrugged shoulders and “That’s gardening!” or “I don’t know, beets are easy to grow!”
One of my fellow gardeners proposed that she rotates her crops every year and that perhaps I didn’t turn over the soil enough before planting my seed, had I planted the seed when the earth was warm enough? She confided she has a thermometer she uses for this and mentioned reading the seed packet.
It puzzled me, I always felt beets were easy to grow as my grandmother had her beets planted in the same spot every year. I remember yummy steamed beet
Healthy beet plants in Bethany. Photo: Melodie Seto.
greens and her wonderful pickled beet recipe, not too much vinegar, just enough brown sugar for the sweet. Not easily swayed I went to the internet to dig deeper.
One of the things I found out are beets are slow germinators and in that early stage of the germination its good to provide row cover especially if you are experiencing (cool nights) or heavy rains which make the soil difficult to push through for the young seedlings (I believe much of the rain we had this past June came down very hard) also if you have a cold dry spring with the warmer temps coming late (which we had this year) it can also impede your beets growth.
Some other tips I got from our community gardeners this year you might want to try is if you have had problems with earwigs eating your bean plants. They are creatures of the night so you can’t pick them off your plants nor would you see them chowing down on the leaves. I’ve been told putting out dishes or shallow containers of small amounts of vegetable oil or water with dish soap amongst the plants getting eaten will capture and kill the pests without using pesticides. It was also mentioned to me by a local dog walking friend that if your trying to get rid of plantain in your garden you can spray it with cider vinegar (diluted with abit of water) to kill it without harming your other plants, I have tried that and it does work well.
When I was asking my questions to my fellow gardeners they said, “Hey ask Ed Lawrence on CBC.” My husband also mentioned this before you ladies as he is a CBC addict, so I went to Ed’s website and there is all kinds of great information there with recipes for killing ants and aphides right on the front page; (http://www.gardeningwithed.com/).
Myself I try to garden biodynamically and in that way it is believed everything serves a purpose; even weeds! When I was up at the community garden one night I was helping everyone pick potato bugs off the plants and drop them in a pail of water. I went to my own potatoes and noticed ants were eating the eggs of these pests. Hmm I thought maybe nature is doing me a favor here. I have never picked or seen a potato bug on my plants. Just a little food for thought folks!
