by Beetroot is not the most difficult vegetable to grow. Usually, minimal care is enough for it to please with an abundant harvest. However, sometimes the lower leaves of beetroot turn yellow and dry out, leading to sad thoughts and calling into question the possibility of harvesting.
There may be quite a few reasons for what is happening, and it is important to understand when the problem will resolve itself and when the plant needs your urgent intervention.
Insufficient watering of beets
Sometimes the leaves of red beets turn yellow as a result of a hot, dry summer and irregular or insufficiently abundant watering. The green part of the plant looks weak, dry, develops poorly and withers. Do not think that the root crop itself is much better at this time – it also suffers from a lack of moisture.
Therefore, if you have not watered your beets for a long time and there is no rain in the forecast, make it a rule to thoroughly moisten the soil at least once a week. Ideally, the soil in the beet bed should be constantly moist. In a not too hot summer, watering at a rate of 10-12 liters per 1 sq. m of plantings is enough for this.
10 days before harvesting, stop watering the beets.
Nitrogen deficiency
Another possible reason why beet leaves turn yellow is a lack of nutrients in the soil, or more precisely, nitrogen starvation. It is nitrogen that is responsible for the formation of green mass in plants, and when there is a shortage of it, the leaves grow poorly, first their veins turn yellow, and then all of them entirely.
If you have not added organic matter or complex mineral fertilizers to the beds this year or the previous year, it is quite possible that your beets are starving. This can be corrected with root and foliar feeding. The fastest way to work is a three-day infusion of mullein or chicken manure (1 kg per bucket of water), which is poured between the rows at the rate of 1 bucket per 10-15 running meters. After fertilizing, the leaves need to be rinsed with clean water.
If it is not possible to obtain organic matter, dissolve 30 g of nitrophoska and 300 g of ash in a bucket of water.
Beetroot diseases
Sometimes it’s not that simple and the fact that beet leaves turn yellow and stems wither indicates a disease. Fortunately, this crop does not have many of them and they all have noticeable distinctive features that will help an experienced gardener understand what kind of misfortune has happened to his potential borscht and fix everything.
Fomoz
If the leaves are damaged unevenly, but in spots, turn brown, and there are black dots on the spots, then the beet has been attacked by phomosis. The next stage of the disease will be damage to the root crop and the development of rot.
At the first signs of this fungal disease, you need to treat the beet tops with a solution of boric acid (1/2 teaspoon per 10 liters of water). Also, in the future, it is worth choosing varieties that are resistant to phomosis or treating the seeds and adding boric acid to the soil at a rate of 3 g per sq.m.
Beetroot jaundice
Beet yellows virus, which causes leaves to change color starting from the tips, is carried by aphids. It is dangerous for beets in both years of life and often appears on the plant in the spring. Yellows spread at an incredible speed and can reduce the yield by more than 60%. It is easy to understand that this virus has developed in your beds: not the lower leaves of the beets turn yellow, as usually happens, but also those in the center of the bunch. First, the upper edge of the leaf turns pale, then the veins die off, and only then everything else.
Regular weeding and destruction of harmful insects can protect beets from jaundice. However, affected plants will have to be removed from the bed to prevent the disease from spreading further.
Beet pests
Sometimes, when beet leaves turn yellow, and it is not clear what to feed them with, and nothing helps, the whole point is that insect pests have set up a dining room on the plantings. Of course, beets are not as appetizing as apple trees or cabbage, but they also have loyal “fans”. Who are they and how to find them?
Beet aphid
Small black insects, no more than 2 mm long, can turn your beet bed into a miserable sight. They settle on the underside of the leaves, suck the juice out of them, causing the beet leaves to curl and turn yellow, and the plant to weaken and not be able to develop fully. Beet aphids rarely cause beets to die completely, but they reduce the yield several times. In addition, they easily migrate to other crops, not disdaining almost anything in the garden and vegetable garden.
You can protect plants from aphids using both industrial preparations and folk remedies.
Beet leaf miner
Small gray flies that appear on beets at the end of May are not as harmless as you think. Of course, they themselves will not harm the plant, but their larvae, hatching at the beginning of June, can cause yellowing of beet leaves. First, they gnaw holes in the leaves, which then dry out and turn into holes, and then the riddled leaf changes color and dies.
Since the fly pupae overwinter in the soil, deep autumn digging, timely removal of weeds in the spring (especially quinoa, which they feed on before the beets emerge) and the use of systemic insecticides such as Avant or Tsi-Alpha can save you from them.
Beetroot shield bug
Another fan of beets and quinoa is the shield bug. In adulthood, it is a tiny brown-red turtle, and in childhood, it is a green larva. It is the larvae that gnaw the underside of beet leaves, and they can wait out the absence of their main delicacy on almost any weeds of the Buckwheat and Chenopodiaceae families.
A folk remedy for beet shield beetles is celandine powder, which is recommended to be used to dust plantings. However, celandine is not always at hand, and pests may appear before you prepare a harmless remedy. But the industry suggests using Fufanon-Nova against this pest, diluting 13 ml of the substance in 10 liters of water.
Of course, beets have other problems, pests and diseases. They often become the object of attention of fungi, insects, and can simply react negatively to the wrong composition and acidity of the soil. However, beet leaves turn yellow in most cases precisely for the reasons listed. Therefore, if the calendar shows only the first half of summer, the beet roots are still small, and the leaves have suddenly lost their natural green color, check if everything is in order and if you have not become the unwitting owner of one of the listed problems.
Now you know why beet leaves turn yellow and how to deal with it. Take care of your plantings properly, and they will certainly thank you in the fall.
