Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [15]
Northern Europeans didn’t catch on to asparagus until much later, but by the time they came to the New World, they couldn’t leave it behind. It’s a long-lived plant whose seeds are spread by birds from gardens to hedgerows, so we have wild populations of it growing in every temperate part of North America where enough rain falls to keep it alive. It likes light soils where the top few inches of the ground freeze in winter. It’s especially common along roadsides and railroad right-of-ways that are kept clear of overlying vegetation. Wild asparagus is not always tastiest but offers the advantage of being free. My father used to love bringing home bundles of it in early spring when house calls took him out on the country roads where it grew. The biggest problem is finding it, among tall weeds, in the first day after emergence when it has to be cut. Dad always made it a point to notice tall stands of wild asparagus later in the summer wherever they waved in the breeze. He would stop his car, get out, and mark the location of the patch with orange flagging tape he carried for this purpose. If the highway department or winter weather didn’t take down his flags, we’d have well-marked asparagus checkpoints all over the county the next spring. We kids loved the idea of eating anything stolen, especially with lots of butter.
In my adult life I have dug asparagus beds into the property of every house I’ve owned, and some I rented—even tiny urban lots and student ghettoes—always leaving behind a vegetable legacy waving in the wake of my Johnny-Asparagus-seed life. I suppose in those unsettled years I was aspiring to a stability I couldn’t yet purchase. A well-managed asparagus bed can keep producing for twenty or thirty years, but it’s a ludicrous commitment to dig one into the yard of a student rental. It’s hard work to dig the trench, fill it with compost, and tuck in a row of asparagus crowns ordered from a seed company. Then you wait three years for a harvest. A too-young plant gets discouraged when you whack off its every attempt to send up new shoots in the spring, abuse that will make the plant sink into vegetable despair and die.
After the plant has had two full summers to bulk up, then you can begin cutting off its early efforts—but only for two weeks in the first year of harvest. Even with fully mature plants, the harvester must eventually back off from this war between producer and consumer, and let the plant win. After about eight weeks of daily cutting, the asparagus farmer puts away the knife, finally letting the spears pass beyond edibility into the lanky plants they long to be. For most crop species, the season ends when all the vegetable units have been picked and the mother plant dies or gets plowed under. Asparagus is different: its season ends by declaration, purely out of regard for the plant. The key to the next spring’s action is the starch it has stored underground, which only happens if the plant has enough of a summer life to beef up its bank account. Of all our familiar vegetables, the season for local, fresh asparagus is the very shortest, for this reason.
Don’t expect baby asparagus tips any time other than March, April, or May, unless you live in New Zealand or South America. Some California farmers have worked out a way to cut a brief second harvest in late fall, but this is exceptional. For most of us, if we see asparagus in any month far removed from April, we’re looking at some hard traveling. At our house we only eat asparagus for the weeks it’s in season, but during those weeks we eat it a lot—the spears must be cut every day. About the same time the asparagus plant is getting weary of our management plan, we’re starting