154 WISCONSIN STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY 
containing five roots while small, and three when full grown. 
Marketed at retail prices, as we do, it is a good crop and of 
ready sale, yielding a gross return of about $500 per acre, but 
involves a good deal of labor in bunching and handling; so 
that only about half this amount is net profit. Late in May 
we run the subsoiler through the wide rows, level with a rake, 
and sow ruta bagas, or transplant, if quite late, from seed 
beds. 
Of late beets we always sow a few of the long blood at 
the same time with our Early Bassano, and early turnip, to 
keep up a succession until the main fall crop is marketable. 
For the main crop we usually grow from one-half to two- 
thirds of an acre on the ground used for early peas. We grow 
the plants in a seed bed, sowing about the 25th of April, so 
that by the 10th of June, when the peas are pulled the roots 
are as large as butternuts. Taking them up carefully with the 
spading fork we cut off all the tops to within two inches of 
the crown, and the same proportion of the root. The ground 
having been well prepared is marked with the garden marker 
into rows a foot apart each way, and at every intersection a 
plant is set, leaving them a foot apart each way. Of course a 
wet or cloudy time is to be preferred, but new plowed ground 
is always favorable to root growth, and though they droop for 
a time and look quite dead, yet the store of nourishment in 
the root, together with the small amount of leaf surface left 
sustains life till little rootlets are thrown out, when they at once 
begin a vigorous growth in the soft soil. We find this supe¬ 
rior to the old method, because— 
1st. We get two crops from the ground. 
2d. Transplanting is not near the labor of a single weeding, 
to say nothing of two. 
3d. The ground being soft and fresh from so recent a plow¬ 
ing, and not compressed by the tramping during sowing, two 
weedings and two or three hoeings is much more favorable to 
root growth and produces a larger yield per acre. 
Beets do best on ground heavily manured the year previous. 
Laebes ts usually net about two-thirds as much as early ones. 
