The Poet's Crop

Asparagus is not a crop for the faint of heart. It is a poet’s crop, or an artist’s.

Even more than most crops, planting asparagus requires a leap of faith, a confidence in the future, an expectation of stability, a small hope for permanence. Laying the fleshy roots – like octopus tentacles surrounding the eager bud of an asparagus spear – a foot deep in the soil, the asparagus farmer holds onto no small amount of optimism and practices no small amount of patience while closing the trenches over a crop that is years off into the future. An act of faith. Of hope. Of a potential future, as yet unrealized, as yet unpromised.

The farmer can’t help but think at this time, bearing these small burdens down into the soil, of the future. The reward of the asparagus patch does not come in the first year, when the toothpick-like spears must be let to grow to store away the sunlight for the following spring, and for many springs thereafter. Only in the second year does the farmer take a crop, and then, only a small one, just a week’s harvest to wet the appetite, to encourage the now-hidden source to divide. And in the third year, again, the farmer harvests for just two years, taking just enough of the new year’s growth to cause a little concern under ground, where the crown divides again to make more opportunities for the fern-like fronds to find their way.

This year is never the year that shows the yield of the asparagus farmer’s work. The caring, the tending, the worrying – after the brief frenzy of incredible greenness of growth betrayed, snipped off as it tries to reach above the ground – all this goes to growing large, fern-like towers, reaching overhead, inedible. Stretching for the sun all summer, dying in the fall, leaving nothing at the close of winter except bare dirt and expectations.

One day in the spring, hearty shoots slip through the earth. If the farmer is there to see it, it is joy, rows bending around the curve of a hill. Faith and hope rewarded.