The biggest beetroot

One of the girls holding up an enormous beetroot by its stalks, the leaves reaching up over her head

I had to go back through the photos to work out what we actually did in 2016, which probably tells you something about how one season runs into the next. What the photos say is that it was a good year, and that everybody was in on it.

It opened on New Year's Day with the biggest beetroot I have ever grown. The leaves went up over her head. I have grown a lot of beetroot since and never got close to it again. A few weeks later there was a bucket of tomatoes coming off the same beds, which is the sort of January I would take every year.

By spring it had turned into a proper family job. I was down in the bed with the youngest and a trowel, my wife was putting flowers in along the edge, and there were kids in gumboots with the hose and seedlings going in at the trellis. Looking back, that is the part worth keeping. The beetroot was only ever going to be a photo.

One of the girls leaning over a green bucket filled with ripe tomatoes picked off the beds

Crouched over the raised bed with the youngest, both our hands on the trowel, planting a seedling

One of the girls kneeling in the bed with her hands in the soil around a young seedling, the new trellis behind her

Note to self

Take photos of the ordinary weeks, not just the big harvests. The years I cannot remember are the ones I have no pictures of.

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