Mimulus, Petunias, and the Great Beetroot Emergency of Last Night
Right then. Picture the scene. It's last night, tea's nearly ready, and Sara turns round from the hob with that particular look on her face — the one that means a question is coming and I am not going to like the answer. "Have we got any beetroot?" Now, I want you to understand something about me. I am a man who grows beetroot with something close to devotion. I sow it, I thin it, I fuss over it, I talk to it more than is probably healthy. So you'd think the answer to "have we got any beetroot" would be an easy, confident yes. Instead I did that thing where you open the freezer door and stare into it as if eye contact alone might summon beetroot into existence. It did not. We had peas. We had a mystery bag of something from 2025 that nobody dared open. We did not, in that precise moment, have beetroot. Crisis narrowly avoided, because right at the back, behind the mystery bag, I found a bag of last year's beetroot that I'd cooked, cooled and froz...
