This Is How to Grow, Sell & Harvest Beets Like a Pro!

so okay we're gonna we're gonna talk about beats now and beats are a little bit easier to grow than carrots harvesting is certainly easier some of these these are some of these are paper pot transplanter I think it's all paper pot transplanter so the thing with the paper pot transplanter is you have to really time your harvest and this is what happens if you don't you get lint you get these lanky beets that are constricted in the space of the paper chain and then it's not an ideal product when you're selling the chef's in my experience they're very particular with the kind of beet they want and I'm gonna try to find the perfect beer for you while he's doing that we have one set that buys a lot but it's the same good that's fine like we're doing right 600 pounds of carrots I'm sorry let's take sixty pounds of carrots every other week anyways they actually they like that they actually won't long because that they want to slice it and so they want to have more to slice I can't Curtis is right we were about two weeks behind on this for just we we we had tomatoes here before with a caterpillar title and we just we just never got to it so we like fennel anything that we know we can sell this to at least one guy but in general you know it needs to be like a two week this for high-end restaurants that is what you want for a beet yep just like a little bit bigger than if it's between a ping-pong ball and a golf ball the top end restaurants that's what they want and so you you can get that in a couple different ways if you want it fast seating at a slightly wider density so that you don't do anything harvesting can work and then you get it all ready at once and then it can all come out so you can you can crop out the bed and then plant something else in most cases that's that's ideal you'll have a lower yield though like if you were to have a bed I don't know what the exact yield would be but if you had a bed that was all perfect beats this size they'd have to be about 1/4 inch apart your yield wouldn't really be that significant but you get it out faster so there's you know there's pros and cons but I find if you want a big yield of beets you thin harvest them so I I direct seed beets with the earth way cedar it's the only thing I use that I use the earth way for spinach and and beets it's the only thing I use those that for and for golden beets all direct seed three rows per 30-inch bed for red beets I can direct seed four rows for 30-inch bed and I essentially do a thin harvest so I'll look at a bed like this and I'll come in and what I do is I'll work my way down and I'll harvest what I need and I'll leave it in piles along the ground so I'll just do a little bit and you can check it out so I'm looking for like that's that's good so I'm gonna leave some event some of them in there these beets are actually good because this is what the paper pot but they haven't been in here long enough that they're getting that elongated stretched out look so I'm coming in so I'm innocent move back and I'm gonna put him in like the least amount of piles as possible so I left to pick up at the end because I can't put a tote in here right that's that's the problem so that's why I'm doing this but you know once you get used to this you can go pretty quick and I'm just using my hand to move the ideal candidates around and if you just notice what I did with my hand there is I was pulling out of a cluster and I used my left hand to hold the ones down that I didn't want and then I'm pulling what I want to keep it in the soil cuz we pull it out it's not going to grow back or at least not gonna grow back in the way you want it and you got particularly with the paper pot you've got to be careful about that because you start ripping out the chains you're gonna start ripping out other crops you know you pull the odd one out here and there but that's that's okay so I'm just working my way down right and so what's what we're gonna see if I work my way down this whole hundred foot bed we're probably going to see a few piles every few feet and then once I get once I finished that bed then I come and get my tote and I'll just pack those up so it depends on how you're gonna market them to some chefs with restaurants they want a bit of green on there too they want like essentially they want that but I find for the most part people are cool with just like straight-up topped because they they do store better when it's completely talked my preference in the post-harvest is to top them in the post-harvest I find that they don't the greens don't tear very well as when we go to do radish and turnips you'll see that they tear really easy and it's and it's fast to do in the field my ideal way to do this is to get the beets like this and then I basically get these into totes in big piles facing the same way and then when I go into the post harvest I lay them on the table this way and I have a pair of scissors and I'm just I can take bunches like this at a time and I can just go snip snip snip snip snip snip snip and then compost the greens and then keep the keep the beads I find it actually is better for storage to cut it flat opposed to when I tear I still have a bit of that that's the first thing to rot if you're gonna sit on that for a month that's the first thing to rot and you're gonna get mold that builds up around the top and then it's gonna soften the whole beet and then it's garbage so that's that's how I'm doing it yeah I mean typically we sell hours with the whole leaf that that's that's what the water our chefs want but you know and the inlet with gold because there's no gold beet available in Memphis even with like Cisco and so these other bigger aggregators so at the end of the day they'll take anything as long as it's gold but they would prefer the whole leaf they can use the leaf for something else yeah that's that's true the Li the leaf is nice like beet leaves taste like Swiss chard yep so when you get into the foodie type restaurants they'll like the whole thing because they'll use the whole thing not so much as carrot tops like not a lot of people will use carrot tops some kind of like hardcore hippie juice cafes might juice the Greens like juice the whole carrot but that's that's it's not very common and we're only getting $5 a pound for four beats so you know if you can charge for the greens - that's that's more that's right as far as cinema in the cooler mm-hmm yeah yeah more lesson you know I know one thing that some growers do to sit on beets and carrots for a long time in the winter is they throw water on the floor to increase humidity and in their in their cooler have you ever done that the experiment I haven't cuz usually you know we don't have an issue with with that and you're not sitting on them long enough to eat it yeah I mean III think that this this one we will sit on them longer we're typically we sit on cares for a week and they're just down yeah how long would it be before you come back and revisit that row and that's kind of what I like about beets and and the way I do them is more or less the same I I haven't done them with the paper pot yet but I can see this is working as long as you get them out quick like this this is perfect this set of golden beets is a perfect candidate and if you guys want just come and walk up and and take your hands and look through and see what I'm talking about but this is a perfect candidate we're basically I'm coming through and I'm gonna harvest at least one quarter of what's there and so I might harvest that bed for a month and then on the last picking that will be really easy just cropping it out Prison Break yeah when you said there are two we crop two weeks after the transplanted so okay so this here when you put it on when you seed feeds typically when they first germinate yeah you wanted to have two weeks later [Music] that's right and then what they get in here on this end of the bed so on every field guys on the end of the bed its marked when it was transplanted so if you're curious like hey wouldn't what's done the salad so we had a great a good question over here about storing them like with the greens and how long so you can kind of fake it in a way what I used to do when I was mostly doing restaurants is I would harvest them all and like so we keep the tops on because I could sell them at the farmers market they go in like a weeks over a week's worth they can go into two weeks of CSA basically and then I would sell in the restaurants with the tops if the tops would be the first to rot so what would what we would do is we could sit on like two weeks of beets at once and then if the top started to go then we would top them and then save the beets and just sell bagged beets later at the market or put those in our CSA or sell them to chefs at a lower price so you can kind of like you can kind of cheat it and get the best of both worlds and then just do the topping later to get first first prioritized the premium price with the greens and then go to the topped beet afterwards I'm giving this complete like it how long is too long to have them oh yeah it really depends like if it's in the spring you know it's not long but going this time I mean you could you could ride this out for a while for probably till December that's because of the weather and that's right shorter and cold nighttime temperatures are coming down things just don't go as fast you know that's one thing that's really cool about farming on the shoulder seasons and the winter is that extra time really like relieves a lot of stress on the farm because you don't have to worry about getting stuff out of the field so quick whereas here in the south in the summertime when the crops ready it's ready and has to be out doesn't matter if you're selling it on a Monday or a Friday or the weekend when that crops ready it's coming out doesn't matter what day it is that's why good cold storage is important and protocols to when you harvest are really important those things become more amplified in in the summertime then than they are on the shoulder season so in the summer you got to go when things are ready they're out and they're in the cooler but now this time of year like it's middle a day time and we can harvest two months ago forget about it we'd be out here dying we'd be in the AC yeah yeah yeah so that that's more or less beets in a nutshell [Music]

Channel: Off-Grid with Curtis Stone

Views: 77,650

Keywords: gardening, how to, growing, urban farming, spin farming, vegetables, greens, growing better, high yield crops, get started, sustainable, soil, local, permaculture, off grid, homestead, kelowna, curtis stone, curtis, green city acres, profitable farming, the urban farmer, suburban farming, convert lawn to garden, canada, urban agriculture, market gardening, beets, how to harvest, tennessee, rose creek farms, fertilizer, make money, organic, garden, paper pot transplanter, farming, cash crops

Id: _3cdLKTdpEU

Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 31 2017