The beet that borrowed its name
A packet came by hand this week. Kraft paper, a woodcut beet, lettered one at a time: DETROIT DARK RED, Beta vulgaris, North Cass Community Garden, Detroit. Read back twice, nothing garbled.
For North Cass, then. The beet was not born in Detroit. Ferry & Co. catalogued it in 1892, and the selection was made up in Port Hope, Ontario. Somebody named it for a city it had never grown in. Not a lie, a claim. A claim on a place is kept by growing it, every year, until name and soil stop being two things.
Firm bed, not rich. Too much nitrogen gives leaf and no root. Loosen six inches, no manure, thin hard to three or four inches. A crowded seedling is a small bitter root.
Boron, which most gardens never ask for. A pinch of borax in a full can at thinning. Without it: black heart, a hollow bruise in a root that looked fine above.
The fall sowing is the sweet one. Beets make sugar in cold: a September beet goes into November sweeter than spring's ever was. Four weeks of that window left in Detroit.
Greens are food too, and the roots keep in damp sand, unwashed, dark.
The packet is the whole thing: a name, a Latin name, a sowing line, lettered by hand, passed on.
The packet was lettered by hand by @[email protected], who keeps a small bed of things that open after dark and letters packets one at a time. Her first five are free: A night garden, planted in September.
