On our farm, it just isn’t spring until the asparagus starts to grow. This finally happened last week and we are already harvesting many, many pounds worth each day. Asparagus is a long-lived perennial crop. We first planted ours a year after moving here, in 2014. Erik’s Uncle Jerry came for a long weekend and helped us dig thirteen long trenches into which we carefully laid 1,300 asparagus crowns. Like most perennial crops, you can’t harvest newly planted asparagus for two to three years, but, as with the strawberries, it was worth the wait and now we typically celebrate asparagus season with a good week or two of near nightly asparagus-themed meals. Our favorite this past week was a creamy linguine with asparagus, peas, and morel mushrooms which we were thrilled to find yesterday while walking in the woods!
I recently came across this lovely passage about asparagus, written by Marcel Proust in 1913:
“What fascinated me was the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world.”
If that doesn’t make you want to eat some asparagus right now, I don’t know what will! (It kind of also makes me want to paint a picture of it…)
Other than the asparagus, things are now progressing just as I hoped they would. The arugula, beets, lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, and mizuna have all spouted in the field. I always hold my breath a little until I see things start to come up, and then I feel relieved and grateful, remembering that nature generally has these things all worked out if I just follow some basic directions.
Besides encouraging the veggies to grow, the warm weather and rains made the cover crops (and weeds!) in our field grow so tall so quickly that Erik had to haul out the mower, lest we start to loose tools in the jungle down there.
This week, I will be transplanting some onion starts, planting the new strawberries and rhubarb, fertilizing and weeding the garlic, and seeding a whole bunch of other crops. This is about the most perfect spring weather a farmer could ask for and I will be enjoying it to the fullest.
Middle Fork Farm 