Want a colourful beetroot harvest from one sowing? Beetroot Rainbow Mix brings variety to a sunny vegetable bed, with roots to enjoy roasted, boiled or pickled and young leaves for the kitchen. The colours and size of individual roots will vary.
Ready to grow your own colourful roots? Follow our Beetroot Grow Guide for cool-season sowing, seedbed care, thinning and harvest advice.
Quick Grow Facts
- Crop: Beetroot, Beta vulgaris, grown for edible roots and leaves.
- Growth form: A leafy rosette above a swelling root; no staking or pinching needed.
- Best sowing season: Cooler growing periods; choose your local window rather than sowing unconditionally year-round.
- Position: Sun in cool weather; light afternoon shade can help during exceptional heat.
- Method and depth: Direct-sow under about 1.5 cm of fine soil, or up to 2.5 cm in sandy soil, and keep the seed zone evenly moist.
- Germination: Often about 10 to 15 days in suitable conditions; cold, heat, drying or crusting can delay emergence.
- Final spacing: Thin crowded seedlings to roughly 8 to 10 cm apart for fuller roots.
- Harvest: Begin checking root shoulders when plants are growing well; many garden beets reach useful size around 50 to 60 days after direct sowing, but this is not a fixed result for every root in a mix. Lift while roots are tender, often around 3 to 5 cm across for baby or medium use.
Why Grow Rainbow Mix?
A mixed beetroot row makes harvests visually varied without needing a separate sowing for each colour. Pick roots as they reach a useful size rather than waiting for every plant to mature together. Tender young leaves can also be used sparingly as greens when the crop has been grown with inputs suitable for edible vegetables.
Sow and Care
Break up hard clods and remove stones before sowing so roots have room to swell. Sow directly where plants will mature; transplanting a root crop can disturb its developing root. Keep the seedbed evenly moist but not waterlogged. If several seedlings appear close together, snip extras while small to leave the best-spaced plants. Water steadily as roots fill, weed shallowly and avoid excess nitrogen that encourages leaves at the expense of roots.
South African Growing Windows
In the winter-rainfall Western Cape, use a draining bed and favour the cooler part of the long sowing season, protecting seed rows from persistent winter saturation. In frost-prone inland gardens, sow as soil begins to warm after the hardest frost, or use a mild late-summer to early-autumn period. On the humid coast and in the KZN Midlands, choose a cooler, less storm-prone spell and give leaves airflow. In hot-dry or subtropical inland gardens, avoid the fiercest heat, mulch after emergence and water consistently. Local soil temperature and weather are better guides than a universal calendar date.
Brought to you by Ubuntuberg Seeds.
