Beets were cultivated in the Mediterranean countries and Persia for many centuries BC. In the Transcaucasus, you can still find its wild species. Today, beets are one of the most popular and demanded vegetable crops.
Useful properties of beets
Beetroot is a high-calorie vegetable crop. It contains a large amount of proteins, fiber, fats, sugars, organic acids (malic and citric), potassium, calcium, mineral salts, magnesium, useful for the human body. It also has a high content of iron, phosphorus, iodine and a group of vitamins: C, B, P, PP.
Often this vegetable crop is included in the diet of sick people suffering from cardiovascular diseases, such as hypertension. Doctors recommend including it in the diet in case of circulatory insufficiency of the liver and kidneys, with diabetes mellitus, especially its severe forms, and it is also very useful for anemia.
Biological characteristics of beets
This root vegetable is a biennial plant. In the first year of yield, beets form a rosette of leaves and a root crop, the shape of which can vary from flat to conical. Beets can be white to dark red in color.
The huge advantage of this root crop is that it can be consumed fresh almost throughout the year, due to its excellent storage capacity almost until the new harvest.
The formation of white rings in beets
Before the beet has its first true leaves, it continues to develop a root that is formed from the seed. Gradually, there is a process of thickening and turning it into a root crop. The process of growth of the root crop occurs due to the separation of cambium cells.
Cambium is an educational tissue found in roots and stems. Due to it, the formation of vascular bundles and the growth of the root crop occur.
After the activity of the cambial rings, the peripheral layers of the cambium begin to function. So, by the time beet ripens, it can have up to ten cambial rings.
Between the cambial layers, a parenchymal layer of tissue begins to grow, which contains nutrients and has lighter vascular bundles in color. If you cut a ripe root crop, you can clearly see successively alternating layers of vascular bundles and parenchymal tissue, visually representing concentric rings.
Beetroots grown at 15 to 20oC have much fewer pale rings than beets grown at high temperatures.
There is a direct relationship between the size of the vascular bundles and the number of leaves in the root crop. The larger and larger the root crop, the more leaves it has and the larger the concentric rings.
