just beet it

When Drew and I acquired our garden plot last spring, one of the first things my family (somewhat enviously) said was that we could garden year round. Yes, yes, I suppose that's possible. Except that with the arrival of fall also comes the start of a new school year and shorter days, it gets more difficult to get out to the garden. Over the course of that past few months, we have been removing tomato and pepper plants, sometimes one by one, after they've given us everything they've got. And every weekend, it's the same: we keep saying we're going to get out to the garden to compost and plant winter crops. And then the weekend comes, and we're busy working, or grading, or grocery shopping, or running, or getting in some much needed relaxing.

Anyway, the garden plot is almost bare. We have just one tomato plant and a sage plant. Surprisingly, the tomato plant is still bearing fruit. Home grown tomatoes in December? Don't hate us. I planted beets sometime during the summer, unaware that these are a cool weather crop. Around September, their leaves began to poke out of the ground, and not at all in the neat little rows in which they were planted. They appeared in the most random places, as if I'd been drunk when I'd planted them (for the record, I wasn't).

I went out to pick the beets yesterday, but the giant leaves deceived me. There were pretty much no beets, save for a very tiny one.