For many days the animals had nothing to eat but mangels.
The beetroot is important economically, for its siblings, the sugar beet and the mangel-wurzel, both played dramatic parts in recent history.
Swiss chard, garden beets, stock beets, or mangel-wurzels, and sugar beets all belong to the same species and will intercross readily.
A couple of the beds will be given more attention, and fennel, mangels and sprouting broccoli sown in them.
This group includes Sugar Beets, grown for sugar extraction and mangel-wurzels, grown for livestock feed.
Other crops grown over a comparatively small acreage were beans, turnips, potatoes, oats, barley, mangel-wurzels, clover, tares, peas, and rye; these accounted for the remainder of the arable land.
A mangel-wurzel is a stubborn root that parts company with the earth only after a vigorous tussle, and I don't envy Rab Butler his summer, even though he was paid 8¢ an hour.
The mangel-wurzels were pulled by hand and lead back to the yard by the same horses and carts.
The availability of such compounds is taken for granted these days, but the laborious task of extracting glutamine from kilogram quantities of mangel-wurzels clearly made an impression on the young Williamson.
