If your wanting to make your own beet sugar using common household items you first need the seed and instructions how to grow them. Here are a couple sources for seed.
This thread I discussed processing sugar but will bring that content to this thread eventually https://growingfruit.org/t/diy-sugar-rocket-engine-using-ancient-knowledge/43947/2
I’ve grown sugar beets for deer a few times. They are picky about soil and have high nutrient demands. They are slow to get established and require lots of weed control. Farmers grow Roundup Ready sugar beets for the most part.
If you get the soil, nutrients, and water right they do grow huge.
Do you process any for yourself into sugar? I’m betting you had to try at least a bite out of one. I’ve tried to grow them before but they do not like weeds at all and need good care like regular beets. Thought they would be easy to grow and I was unprepared for the labor that goes into them. The high ph needs appeal to me as our soil is very alkaline here.
Deer love both the foilage and the roots. Excellent attractant for whitetail deer. Grows best in 55 degree soil temperature or warmer. Grows well alone or with other food plot mixes. Seed when ground temp reaches 55 degrees or higher. Sugarbeet seed should not be planted greater than 1.5 in. deep. The plant has a taproot system that utilizes water and soil nutrients to depths of 5 to 8 ft. The life expectancy of sugarbeet leaves varies from 45 to 65 days and is temperature dependent. Sugar beets are well adapted to a wide range of soil types. Sugar beets are produced on coarse textured sandy soils to high organic matter, high clay content, silty clay loam soils.
They’re pretty “blah”. After a few light frosts they do get sweeter. Deer go nuts for them in the winter. They’ll dig through a couple feet of snow to get at them.
The Red River valley along the MN/ND line grows a LOT of sugar beets. The soil there is about perfect for them. If you get west of where I live not far and you’ll start seeing sugar beet fields.
Wanted to go ahead and bring over this content from the other thread
The sugar we make at home will be very different from the table sugar we are used to. We need to understand sugar for many years was made from cane that process is shown below. That cane only grows to full size in the tropics. This video shows cane being processed
We can’t grow cane sugar in a climate like Kansas or a similar place so we need to improvise and make sugar from beets
Has anyone researched non gmo sugar beets?
You might wonder how sugar beets are processed in a commercial operation
Refined sugar is the product we are used to eating all our lives. The non refined type might take some getting used to.
Would love to see you make some sugar or document the growing process this year. I’m not the best at growing beets in general but had a good crop last year because we had colder weather and more rain than normal. Beets are not as easy to grow as people think. Here is what we did More beets please! . Growing vegetable beets is a lot of work in Kansas. Kansas always fools me no matter what I plant. My family gets really mad at me as sometimes I produce literally hundreds or more of extra produce by accident. One year I planted 1 row of cucumbers and got about 50 or more 5 gallon buckets of pickling cucmbers. They are not supposed to produce like that. Was afraid to enter a family members house you could smell the vinegar a quarter mile away from all the pickles they were making. Finally to keep the peace I swapped cucumbers for bell peppers with a local farmer and put the chickens and myself on a 70% cucumber diet. Tomatoes can over produce here as well but i never really know what I will wind up with. Got truck loads of pumpkins one year it took us 7 years to eat them all. We canned them with the pressure cooker.
We use very little sugar. I think the last 5 lb. bag I bought was maybe 7 or 8 years ago. The next time we need some I’ll buy another bag 
We do grow garden beets every year. Our soil must be “right” for them because they are the most delicious beets my wife and I have ever had. We both gardened in other locations before here, and the beets weren’t as good at those locations.
We’ve still got a few bags of beets and beet greens in the freezer. They’re still good even after freezing.
Yes these beets you could taste the nutrition in we grew last year. After eating them we felt the punch of energy we got it was remarkable. When you say good beets I know you mean taste but you likely know what I mean as well when i say the nutrients are much higher. They are best fresh but still very good later. The spinach here does not even taste like spinach its nut like in flavor and makes you feel incredible but it’s hard to grow. Large crops of these type of vegetables take back breaking weeding here and I mean sun up to sun down. Sugar beets seem to follow those needs.
We substitute applesauce for oil in all baking. It makes cakes wonderfully rich and moist. It occurred to me that if we used old fashioned apple butter with a super high brix, we could probably replace oil and sugar both. We’ve not tried it yet but it seems reasonable. Apple cider can be reduced to a syrup just like maple sap, and it should be versatile enough to use as sugar similar to honey.
i pickle all my beets. i could sit there and eat a quart of them. they grow slow here so the taste is very rich. there are many nutrients in them. i leave them in ground until a frost hits them. after reading your post i bought 500 heirloom non gmo sugar beet seeds for $3.99 + free shipping from Esty. ill plant a row to try them out. the rest are going in my survival stash in the freezer. sugar may someday be in demand esp. with the supply line disruptions.
I was hired at Texas A&M in Amarillo in 1971 to work full time on the growing and management of sugar beets. There was a Holly Sugar processing plant in Hereford Texas.
They were a difficult crop to grow in Texas. With irrigation we only averaged about the same refined sugar per acre as dryland crops in MN and ND. The northern areas had higher sugar percent because of cooler weather. We also had soils that retained nitrogen in the root zone. Too much nitrogen lowered sugar percent and caused more sugar to be tied up in molasses.
The most interesting thing might be the effect of soil borne diseases on the crop. Even with a 5 yr rotation those diseases caused a 10-15% decline in yield with each successive crop. So after 4 or 5 crops on any one field the economics were trash.
They were still limping along in the mid 90s trying to find new ground when we had two years in a row with near zero temperatures in early November. That froze the beets which locks up a good part of the sugar into by products. Holly closed their plant soon after.
i added river silt to my raised beds last spring and noticed a definite increase in their flavor in last summers beets and spinach in there. must be the added mineral content
That’s fascinating that you did that research I find it extremely interesting. I’m glad I’m not the only one who found them a little challenging to grow them well. In many ways Texas has the best of everything but at times it feels like the worst of everything as well. We visited some in Amarillo which grows great nopal cactus but I wouldn’t attempt beets I cannot imagine trying. Its dry and dusty there most of the time but there is plenty of water for now in the deep wells. The yards are not grass they are weeds. Mowing those weeds can be challenging since rattlesnakes are common there. Rodents steal chunks of nopal cactus frequently. A cactus fruit farm would be easy to grow and profitable in that part of Texas.
I was out in the sugarbeet field once checking the furrow irrigation. Suddenly a rattler stuck at me but came up just short. I had a hoe in my hand and he was dead before I realized what happened. The shop on that place was infested with them at one point. But overall really they weren’t much of an issue.
Yes it seems like they are there or they are not. The person who finds 1 can expect at least 1 more during breeding season. They do hunt alone often times but the mate will find the body of the one you kill. People who dont know say rattlesnake dens are a myth but its not true they have 20 or more rattlers sometimes. They den up in an old badger or coyote den certain times of the year. Rattle snakes seem to stick together in a certain area. In my area there are 3 places infested with timber rattle snakes which are protected here. Never go to those places myself now but I have been to all 3 and the stories were true there is more trouble there than i wanted. My goal is to leave them alone. In Texas or western Kansas leaving them alone at times just means leaving which I realize is not always possible. In those cases a good offense is a great defense. The hoe you used was the best thing to do in that situation. Killed a king snake by mistake behind my house when he lunged at me like you I had a hoe it’s an instant reaction.
Anyway back to sugar beets if you were growing them in that part of Texas that means they can likely be grown most anywhere.
i dont use alot of sugar but not having any is a problem. like salt and flour its a necessity if you need to bake essentials. ill plant a bunch this spring and play with it. if nothing else it will be a addition to my preparedness should things head south in a bad way. seems they are hardy to z2 so ill leave them buggers in until several frosts hit them. that should bring the sugars up. probably could even leave them in over winter if i wanted.
I look eagerly for the times Isaiah 11:6-9 speaks of…after the return of Jesus Christ, a kid can play in the snake den AND NOT BE HARMED.
God speed the day!
There is not a much worse place to be in this world than that snake den for the time being.
