4 ! 
BEET. 
BEET. 
Betterave. Beta vulgaris . 
VARIETIES. 
Early Blood Turnip-rooted. 
Early Long Blood. 
Extra Dark Blood. 
Yellow Turnip-rooted. 
Early Scarcity. 
Mangel Wurtzel. 
French Sugar, or Silesia. 
Sir John Sinclair’s. 
Beets, in their several varieties, are biennial, and the best 
blood-coloured are much cultivated for the sake of their 
roots, which are excellent when cooked, and very suitable 
for pickling after being boiled tender ; they also, when sliced, 
make a beautiful garnish for the dish, and the young plants 
are an excellent substitute for Spinach. 
The Mangel Wurtzel and Sugar Beets are cultivated for 
cattle. Domestic animals eat the leaves and roots with great 
avidity. They are excellent food for swine, and also for 
milch cows ; and possess the quality of making them give a 
large quantity of the best-flavoured milk. The roots are 
equally fit for oxen and horses, after being cut up into small 
pieces and mixed with cut straw, hay, or other dry feed.* 
A small bed of the earliest Turnip-rooted, and other es- 
teemed kinds of Beets, may be planted in good rich early 
ground the first week in April, which, being well attended 
to, will produce good roots in June. 
Draw drills a foot apart, and from one to two inches deep ; 
drop the seed along the drills one or two inches from each 
* An acre of good, rich, loamy soil has been known to yield two thou- 
sand bushels of beet-roots, some of whi,ch weighed from fifteen to twenty 
pounds each. To produce such enori&ously large roots, they should be 
cultivated in drills from two to three feet apart, and the plants thinned to 
ten or twelve inches in the rows. It is generally conceded, however, that 
moderate-sized roots contain more saccharine matter, in proportion to their 
bulk, than extra large roots, and that twenty tons, or about seven hundred 
bushels, are a very profitable crop for an acre of land, and would be amply 
sufficient to feed ten cows for three or four months of the year. A gen- 
tleman in Connecticut computes the products of one-fourth of an acre of 
good land, a*, eight tons, which, he says, will support a cow the whole 
year. He allows five tons to feed on for nine months, and the other three 
tons to be sold, and the proceeds applied to the purchase of other food, to 
be given from the time the roots fail in the spring, until new roots are 
produ?ed. 
