Last night we had beets.  Garden to table in about 45 minutes.  It doesn’t get fresher than that.

Looks like we need to do a bit of weeding!

I’ve always loved beet greens but for years I didn’t think I liked beets. My mother always used to make Harvard Beets, cooked beets with some kind of sweet  corn starch thickened sauce.  UGH!

When my daughter was about 8 we planted beets.  I just kept cutting the leaves for greens. One day she said “Mum, are we ever going to pick the beets and eat them?”  It hadn’t occurred to me.  We picked them, they were huge by then, and ate them and I discovered beets.

I still cut the leaves for beet greens.  You can do it for quite a long time, new leaves appear.  It’s like a little beet green factory.

We haven’t planted enough beets.  I don’t know if it’s too late to plant more but I’m going to try.  If nothing else we’ll get greens.

And that brings me to the subject of this little essay.

Those of us who love to garden, have held onto our love for the soil, the sun and the rain, because
we see – year after year -  the rewards we reap in the form of clean, health-giving food, planted by us, grown by our own efforts and reaped by our own hands. We know too, that none of this could take place without the intervention of some higher power. Whether that higher power is the Christian God, or the Islamic or Jewish God, or all three…or whether it is collection of lesser gods, which together make up the power of Nature we cannot truly know. We do know this – that we think of Nature as a Feminine Spirit. That’s why we refer to Nature as a Mother. She nurtures us and is vital to our survival as a species. So far, in the great scheme of things, as the decades and centuries have unfolded, we have also come to know and even dread the great power of Nature. The storms, the floods, and the bitter cold of winter. But we have also come to know the incomparable joy of spring – they all speak to Nature’s power and those who contemplate it, are in awe.
I was thinking about all this the other day, as I puttered in my garden. I watched the seeds I’d planted begin to grow into delicate shoots, green and tall. I thought – we ignore this Natural World at our peril. We are an integral part of it. If we abuse this World, we shortchange ourselves. This summer as we watch our gardens grow and admire the lush crops of wheat and corn and other grains begin to mature in farmers’ fields…I thought…

hmmmm…

perhaps we ought to pause and give thanks for the gifts of soil, rain and sun and remember to be humble before Mother Nature’s goodness.

The daffodils are blooming, there are tiny violets sprinkled on the lawn, there are anemones in among the daffodils, and the vinca is just opening. 

It’s our reward for winter.