Cultivating Patience

No other vegetable requires faith in its culture the way asparagus does, and I think it is fair to say that no vegetable can possibly inspire hope in the same way. To plant an asparagus patch is to engage in an act of patience for repeated but fleeting joy in the spring, and each bite, each bursting of a solid spear through the soil, leads us to hope that everything could be so good, so reliable, so in-its-place.

Asparagus roots arrive two full years before any expected harvest. We set the fleshy roots, radiating octopus-like from the meager bud of an asparagus spear, in a foot-deep trench in the field on the hill west of the house on a cold day in early April, nestling the sandy crowns in the cold soil. A crew of a dozen volunteers from Luther College planted eight thousand roots in exchange for our perspective on organic food and farming, arriving at the end of the project flush from unaccustomed labor. Slowly, as the spears emerged from the soil along with the weeds, we filled in the trenches and cultivated the tender stalks, picking nothing, waiting.

We left the asparagus ferns standing over the winter to catch the blowing snow. At three feet tall, brown and oxidized, they must have looked like the worst weed mess the neighbors had ever seen. In the spring, we mowed the fronds as soon as the soil dried enough to drive on it. Weeds germinated and sprouted where we had failed to eradicate them, and we rototilled oh-so-shallow over the top to knock them back. One day in late April, the asparagus poked its head through the crusty soil—not one spear, but all of the spears on the same day. We picked it once, and left the plants to grow and feed their roots for another year while we weeded, tended, and waited.

In this, our fifth year with these plants living deep in the ground, we again mowed the stalks, tilled the weeds, and waited for spring’s truest vegetable to shine forth. And again, from bare soil and seeming nothingness—just a little bit of faith that something actually remained underneath that crust of soil—the asparagus sprang forth in flavorful, magnificent abundance. Is it possible that, just this once, everything in our world could be so good, so reliable, so in-its-place—shining briefly when we need it, marching solidly on through heat and drought, gathering snow through the winter, and shining magnificently again, just when we need it the most?