Turnips and Beets: Round Two

This year I tried my hand at growing a couple of new crops that I had never grown before: turnips and beets.  I had an "extra" garden bed that I didn't want to go to waste, so I filled in some of the extra space with a few short rows of turnips and beets.  Two things went wrong with this bed.  The first was that the drip irrigation that I installed for this bed didn't work very well, so the plants struggled under severe water stress.  The second thing was that I didn't bother pulling the weeds in this bed for a very long time, so it became very overgrown.  The weeds had gotten so bad that I didn't think that any of the turnips or the beets had survived.  The weeds did act as a living mulch for this bed however, and when I finally got around to pulling them I was pleasantly surprised to find that some beets and turnips actually did survive, though none of them had well developed roots yet.  Had I been better about keeping them watered and weeded, I probably would have gotten a good crop from both of them by now since they should grow fast enough to be harvested sixty days after they are planted.

Because they have such a short growing period I decided to give them another chance.  This time I used the bed that was occupied by peas in the spring.  Since this was another bed that had some watering issues, I made sure to add plenty of extra holes to my drip irrigation line here before I planted.  I used a shovel to lightly turn the bed to help break up the larger clods of soil and to make the surface soil fine enough to plant into.  I planted one side of the bed with turnips and the other with a variety of beets.  With the drip line working better, these seeds sprouted in no time and are well on their way to forming good sized roots for harvest.  The other thing that I tried to do in this second planting was to space my seeds out better.  The first round of seeds came up very crowded and I think they didn't grow well in part due to the fierce competition for space.  This time I tried to give a couple inches to each plant, and made sure to thin them while they were still small if they were still too close together.  This approach seems to be working out much better since the row of turnips is filling in nicely without looking crowded.  The beets were a little slower to get going, but their half of the bed is starting to fill in also.