Around May 20th, don't remember the exact date.Looks great! When did you plant them?
Those look great. My deer ignore tubers and have considered beets, but RR seed can be difficult to find and I am not sure I want a plot dedicated to just beets. I look forward to seeing how they progress and how the deer react to them.
Where can you find the RR sugar beet seed? I deal with co-ops and farm stores throughout the mid-Atlantic and no one has been able to find seed for me.
Would be interesting to see a side by side plot of sugarbeet against a more typical Dbltree brassica mix. Use would probably look different on each day. Or maybe not.
Weed control is quite simple. Planted into field that had RR soybeans previous year, clean field, few weeds then - Roundup, lucky enough to have RR sugar beets. Can find out from beet farmers what they use when using non RR sugar beets if people here would like that.
As I understand it Nitro - you spray roundup when the sugar beets emerge to 3" - 4" and your ATV sprayer doesn't really harm them much at that height. Do you also go over them to top-dress Urea a few weeks after emergence or do you give them all the fertilizer they need at planting? How much fertilizer to you generally apply?
Thanks for the tips.
You're on track with height of beets for spraying unless the weeds are getting to tall,. When the weeds hit 2-3 inches tall is when to spray. Roundup seems to do the job better when weeds are smaller and growing fast. Beets hate competition of any kind.
Fertilizer is applied all at once in spring. The reason is, I broadcast the seed and no rows to follow when beets are taller, I would crush to many even with the 4 wheeler. I fertilize according to soil sample, with some extra urea.