Red Mammoth Mangel Beets produce an incredible mass of edible beet leaves and a large root up to 20 lbs or more in size! These beets prefer deeply tilled, free draining, sandy soil to achieve full size. Simply allow your animals to graze on the tops, cut the tops for feeding or harvest the root. Surprising how juicy and sweet these giant beets are!Average: 100 days Planting Instructions Sugar/Fodder beets are similar to the familiar red-rooted garden beet, but are much larger, reaching about 2 to 4 pounds when mature. They tend to have shiny, white roots, and as you might guess, a high sugar content, containing 13-22 percent sucrose. To plant, prepare your seed beds in a sunny location with firmly packed soil. Sow the seed in slightly moist soil at a depth of three-quarters to 1.5 inches. Sugar beets adapt well to a variety of soil types, but you'll want to make sure the soil is well-drained and free of roots and large stones that can inhibit the roots' growth. Sugar beets prefer a soil pH of 6.0 to 6.5. Planting seeds 1 inch apart in rows and then thinning the plants when they grow 4-6 leaves, spacing the plants 10-12 in. apart. Space rows 18-24 in. apart. Remember that sugar beets stop growing when they run up against a hard freeze. Green Manure crops do not qualify for the reduced rate shipping.
