If at first you don't succeed

 We grew mangle/ sugar beets this year and as you can see they did good. Admittedly the ones in the pic are trophy size compared to the majority but they were all good sized. We planted them with the intention of using them for livestock feed and that is what we did with most of them. Cattle really like them and our steer and milk cow got most of them but the pigs and chickens ate their share too. We ran them through a old meat grinder and added them to our normal grain ration to extend it. This worked well and we will try some again this year.
  Some time during the growing season we read a article about making sugar from sugar beets at home so we thought we would give that a try since we had beets to try it with. I'm not sure if mangles are the same thing as sugar beets or not . These were quite sweet if you took a bite of them. At any rate our sugar experiment was a flop to say the least. I thought we followed the directions closely so maybe mangles and sugar beets are different. It would be nice to be able to add another sugar to our maple sugar production.  This year I will make sure that whatever seed we get is called sugar beet.