Sowing beetroot and planting chard

Hello everyone,

I’m Gavin, one of the Sustainable Farming Assistants. Joris was encouraging us to share what we’ve been up to, to build up a bank of knowledge and a kind of diary of the farming year, so I thought I’d say a little bit about what Bart, Chris and I were doing last Thursday.

We were in Field 3, to the far north east of the veg shed. First of all, we were planting out some young Swiss chard plants we collected from the potting tunnel – four to row with I think a foot between each row, or perhaps a bit less. Our planting wasn’t particularly straight, I’m afraid, as it’s surprisingly easy to lose you’re straight line when you’re up close. As we were planting, we were also taking off any withered, yellow or too-eaten leaves so that the plant’s energy would go into growing useable, healthy ones instead. We also learned the technique for extracting them without breaking the very flimsy plastic pots. By the way, the chard roots are spectacular – they are almost as colourful as the stems themselves.

Next up we were sowing beetroot seeds directly into the field – 3 kinds: Chioggia (the stripey one), cylindrical and the regular purple one everybody knows. First we were making very shallow trenches across the beds, each about a hoe’s-width apart. In fact, trench is the wrong word, as they should be so shallow as to be not more than depressions in the soil – just guidelines for where to sow the seeds, as these don’t need to be planted deep. We did go too deep with some rows.

With that done, it’s a matter of taking a pinch of seeds in your hand and trying to scatter them relatively evenly along each line – about a seed per inch. I’m afraid I went overboard with this, risking overcrowding and wasting our precious seed. It takes a while to get the regular scattering of seed right. Then we gently raked a thin layer of soil over each row, and then used the hose/spray to water them in, which also helps the soil settle in around the seeds and trigger the germination process. After that we did hard labour, hauling the massive net over the beds and weighing them down with sandbags that we barrowed across the field.

A couple of things to mention: The tilth of the soil we were sowing the beetroot into should really have been finer, according to Bart, but we had to make do. And as for overcrowding, well, some can be thinned out and still used – small baby beetroots are quite attractive for restaurants apparently. But even taking this into account, I definitely overegged the sowing, so I’m going to try to learn from that.