While working on the wattle weave bed in the old kitchen garden, I had to go around the beet bed constantly. Our beets did not do well this year, and in the end, I hadn’t bothered harvesting anything. It just didn’t seem worth it.

While working on the other bed, however, I sometimes had to stick a spade or garden fork into the ground to have them out of the way for a while, and a few times that meant sticking them into the beet bed.

Which is when I noticed that some of them actually looked useable.

So I harvested them.

This was all I got, out of the three varieties of beets planted in that bed. They’re so small, but my daughters like them at this size. They’ll be able to use them for maybe one or two meals.

Which is a heck of a lot more than I expected to get out of that bed!

At this point, we’re not sure if we’ll grow beets again next year. We’ve only been gardening for three years here, but each year has been worse than the one before. Perhaps we’ll try again, after we’ve built up the soil more and have better raised beds. If we do grow beets again next year, I think we’ll only do one variety, and save trying multiple varieties for the future. It’s hard to know which of the ones we tried are types we like, when we’ve yet to have a really good growing year for beets.

I’ll take what we can get for now, though!

The Re-Farmer