The Three Weeks of Asparagus

In April the asparagus bed is the first patch of ground that looks alive. The rest of the garden is still wet and flat, holding the mud of snowmelt, not ready for anything. The fruit trees are bare sticks, the soil is too cold to turn, and the pea seeds are still in their packet. Then one morning there is a crack in the bed — a small mound heaved from underneath, dirt broken into crumbs from below — and a green tip pushes through the middle of it, tight as a fist, scaled like a pinecone. It was not there the night before.

The spear comes up with a color that gets away from the word green. The tip is a deep purple-green, almost bronze, and the shaft is pale where the soil still clings to it. In the early light of an April morning the whole bed stands in rows of these tight little points, each one throwing a long shadow across the dirt. A hard frost can silver them and slow things down, but it will not stop them. Asparagus is the hardy one. It comes up while the rest of the garden is still gambling with frost, putting out its crop before the maple leaves are the size of a squirrel's ear, on a calendar of its own.

Everything else is waiting. April is the month that cannot make up its mind — warm enough one day for shirt sleeves, cold enough the next for a jacket — and still the asparagus is out of the ground and in a hurry. On a warm week a bed will go from flat to ankle-high in days. It is the earliest thing a northern garden can put on a plate, and it knows it. The first cutting is an event. The spears are carried inside like a message from the ground, proof that the winter is over in fact and not just on the calendar.

The long bet

The hurry is strange, because the bed itself is the slowest thing in American cultivation. Asparagus is not planted and harvested in the same year like the rest of the row. The crowns go into a deep trench as gnarled brown things that look like dead roots, and have to be set down in ground that drains, because a crown sitting in wet soil will rot before it ever sends up a spear. The first spring, nothing is cut. The second, barely anything. A real harvest waits for the third or fourth year, and by then the person who dug the trench has learned to wait — which is the whole lesson of the crop.

The reward for that patience is a bed that outlasts its gardener, and often the next one too. The same roots go on sending up spears for decades, long after the rest of the garden has been rotated, replanted, or given over to grass. In the country where asparagus grows well — the sandy ground of southern New Jersey, the dark peat of the Sacramento delta, the river-bottom loam of the Midwest — whole fields of it turn to green lace by midsummer, and the people who farm them know exactly how old each planting is. A bed is inherited like a piece of furniture, and treated with the same care.

So the crop that rushes is the crop that can afford to. The spear that breaks the cold April ground is spending a savings account built up over years of summers, when the ferns stood through the heat and took in the sun. It spends everything at once. The first spears are thick — some as big around as a thumb — and they stand straight as posts in the bare dirt, like nothing else in the garden dares to do.

The three weeks

Harvest is a daily act. The picker walks the row bent over, reading the ground for the places where the soil has lifted into a shallow crown of cracks, and cuts below the surface. Some people snap the spear where it breaks naturally, at the point where the shaft turns from tender to tough. The tool for the job is a slender blade with a notch worn into the end, made to slide down alongside the spear and sever it clean, bringing it up with a little pale shank that never saw the light. Cut wrong, and the crown's other buds can be wounded. Cut right, and the bed hardly notices.

It grows back. What is cut one morning is replaced by the next; a warm night will push up a whole row. This is the rhythm of the three weeks — walk, bend, cut, carry, walk again. It is the first repetitive work of the season, and after the long idle of winter it feels like proof that the year has turned. A cold April stretches the season out; a hot one compresses it. The bed runs on soil temperature, not on the calendar.

Then, as suddenly as it began, the bed gives its signal: the spears come up thinner, some no fatter than a pencil. That is the message to stop. The good grower quits even while the bed is still producing, because cutting the thin ones is borrowing from next April. Three weeks, give or take, is the entire season.

After that the spears that are left are allowed to go up and open out, each one relaxing into a feathery branch of green lace. By early summer the bed is a chest-high thicket that looks abandoned, a tangle of fern that would embarrass a neater gardener. Through the long heat of June, July, and August the ferns do the real work of the year, taking in sun and sending it down to the crown, filling the account for the next spring. The bed looks overgrown precisely because it is busy.

The month's crop

April has almost nothing else to offer. The wild greens are barely up, the rhubarb is a tight red bud, the lettuce is a row of fuzz. Asparagus is the month's one full harvest, and people arrange their cooking around it the way they arrange their summer around tomatoes. For three weeks it shows up everywhere — roasted hard in a hot pan until the tips char, dropped into boiling water and pulled out while still bright green, eaten standing at the sink. Then it is gone. What appears in the market later in the year, trucked in from places where spring came earlier, is not the same proposition. The whole point was that it grew in April, in the ground out back, and it lasted exactly as long as April lasts.

The ferns stand through the fall and go brown with the first hard frost. In late winter they are cut down flat, and the bare bed waits again with nothing above ground to show that anything is there. The person who planted it — or who inherited it from whoever did — knows the schedule by heart. Asparagus needs three weeks of cutting every year and eleven months of leaving it alone. It comes up, it is cut, it stops, it goes to fern, it waits.