March 20, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Jill Lepore’s “Pay Dirt,” a wonderful review of seed catalogues. It begins and ends with beets. Here’s the ending:

Or you could just grow some beets and eat them. You can plant them soon, so soon. Three weeks before the last frost: it’ll be here before you know it. Poke a hole in the ground half an inch deep. You can use your pinkie to measure, fingertip to first knuckle. The seeds of the common beet are about the size of peppercorns. Plop them in one by one, two inches apart. Rows are good. After a couple of weeks, when the tops pop up, yank out the seedlings that have come up too close together; I try to chuck them over the fence by smashing them with a trowel, as if they were little green-and-red badminton birdies. It passes the time. Wait another month, then dig up the roots and wash them off in the kitchen sink. They’ll be red-fleshed and globe-shaped and fist-size and grubby and hairy, and I usually roast them. You can even eat the leaves: they look like red-veined chard, and I have always found that they taste like dirt, but I don’t mind.

That “They’ll be red-fleshed and globe-shaped and fist-size and grubby and hairy, and I usually roast them” is excellent!

In her piece, Lepore mentions another great New Yorker “garden catalogues” review – Katherine S. White’s classic “A Romp in the Catalogues” (March 1, 1958), included in White’s 1979 collection Onward and Upward in the Garden. It contains one of my all-time favourite New Yorker lines: “To me a ruffled petunia is occasionally a delight but a ruffled snapdragon is an abomination.”