Our First Asparagus: Worth the Wait

We planted purple asparagus crowns during our first Spring here.  Normally, you are meant to wait two years after planting before you begin to harvest asparagus, so last Spring should have been our first harvest.  We had so few spears though, and they were all so scrawny and sad, that we decided to just let them go another year, in hopes that leaving them unpilfered would yield a bumper crop this year.  

So far, though we don’t seem to have many spears coming up at once (and we probably never will, in that I don’t think we planted quite enough crowns to give us a good supply, and because about half of our crowns didn’t survive their first winter in the ground), the ones that do come up are beautiful and much more robust than last year. Thus, we decided to just go ahead and begin harvesting, and boy, are we glad that we did!

Our first haul, pictured above, was the sweetest, most delicate asparagus we’ve ever tasted. And we’ve since learned that harvesting spears as they come up actually tends to stimulate the production of more spears. Still, we may never get more than a handful of spears at once: all the better to savor.