COLOURFUL BEETROOT
These fast-maturing veg are a tasty salad crop to fill gaps in the veg patch.
Beetroot is unanimously popular in the vegetable garden, and at last this popularity seems to be matched in the kitchen. Beetroot is popping up in everything, from chocolate brownies to roasts, dips, salads, soups and crisps. Thankfully there’s a good diversity of seed on the market. You can buy the round white, yellow, red and ringed (Chioggia) types, and most seed catalogues now offer a mix of different types, including the elongated roots more often associated with long storage. If you keep an orderly kitchen, the white variety has the added bonus of not ‘bleeding’ everywhere while keeping that sweet and earthy beetroot taste. Try beetroot leaves young in salads, or as a chard substitute. Beetroot will grow noticeably faster on soil that has been enriched with plenty of well-rotted organic matter. If you sow in spring, pick a variety that won’t bolt with the cooler temperatures such as ‘Boltardy’. By early summer you can sow any cultivar. Be prompt with sowing if you want generous-sized roots come autumn. Direct sow in lines 30cm (12in) apart and thin seedlings to 10cm (4in), or station-sow clusters of seeds every 15cm (6in) in a grid system. The latter technique is good for shading out weeds. If you allow three or four seedlings to develop at each cluster, you’ll find they happily grow together Pull some plants early for baby salad roots; allow others to grow on to a more generous size Beware over-sowing. Knobbly beetroot seed is actually clusters of several seed already, so do thin them out.