Mangels (aka fodder beets)
One of our new crops this year is Mammoth mangels,
a kind of fodder beet often grown for livestock. In our case, we're
hopeful the roots will supplement our milk goat's diet during the winter
months. I only planted one bed, though, since I wasn't sure whether
Abigail would actually eat the offering and also wasn't sure how well
the fodder beets would grow in our garden. With new crops, it always
makes sense to start small!
I'd been ignoring our mangel bed all summer, actually. But when I dropped by to weed the bed, I realized that forgetting to thin our plants this spring
meant some roots would be best harvested early. So when I went ahead
and pulled the largest plants and will hope that the smaller mangels
left behind will still have time to bulk up this fall. I ended up with
about half a bushel of thinnings --- pretty impressive from about nine
square feet of growing area!
Mangels are reputed to be a high-quality feed for ruminants,
but there are a couple of reasons why the crop has fallen out of favor.
First is the thinning problem. Like their relative Swiss chard, each
mangel "seed" is really a cluster of seeds. So you nearly always end up
with two or three plants in each spot, meaning you absolutely have to
hand thin. As I learned, if your seeds germinate well and you don't
thin, mangels won't thrive since they're too close together. On the
other hand, if you have so-so germination and forget to thin, the plants
can still grow quite large even without thinning.
The other potential issue
with mangels is that they can cause scouring (diarrhea) if fed in large
quantities to ruminants. Johnny's (the source of our seeds) reports
that small roots of our variety can be fed to livestock immediately, but
that it's safer to wait at least a month before feeding larger roots.
So I'll try a few of the fingerling mangels on Abigail today and will
sock away the larger roots in the crisper drawer of our fridge, which
has been halfway emptied after the huge influx of carrots this spring
made their way into our goat's mouth. It looks like goat-feed season is
shifting from orange to red roots --- I hope Abigail enjoys the mangels
as much as the more labor-intensive carrots!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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