The other night we had the first fresh asparagus of the season. In fact, it was the first fresh asparagus we’d had in several years — the past few places we’ve lived we didn’t have friends or know farmers who grew it.
I don’t possess the literary skills to do it justice, but suffice it to say that the taste of fresh asparagus is undeniably superior to anything one can buy at a grocery store. I’m skeptical of whether this can be scientifically proven via modern methods of single-factor analysis, but I know it’s true.
Growing asparagus like this is perhaps our primary goal here on the farmstead. We know it’ll be a long process — the crowns we bought will take a few years to establish before we can pick from them, and the seeds we started indoors were much cheaper but will take even longer. For now we’ll have to rely on good neighbors — not a bad thing.
I did recently realize, though, that perhaps before planting I should have consulted a bit more ancient wisdom. The oldest surviving work of Latin prose (not poetry) is actually Cato the Elder’s De agri cultura (“On Farming”) — from about 160 B.C. He recommends both transplanting asparagus crowns (“Cover them very deep with sheep dung; this is the best for this purpose, as other manure produces weeds”) and direct seeding — putting two or three seeds in the ground and then covering them thickly with manure, and planting after the vernal equinox.
I obviously need to get some sheep. I also need to figure out when the vernal equinox is. Because Cato is likely right here — the old ways of growing vegetables are still valid and shouldn’t be ignored.
The difficult thing is to discern what ancient wisdom to believe and what modern science to trust. In the passages right before he talks about asparagus, Cato advises using wormwood to prevent chafing and recommends an incantation one can use to cure a joint dislocation. On the other side, contemporary science often uses reductionistic methods to try to prove how a single, isolated variable affects a holistic system of immense complexity. Both ways require a healthy dose of skepticism.
Sometimes an agricultural truth is simple to recognize. This came about in this issue of the magazine when the same message — the importance of good drainage — surreptitiously appeared, without planning, in the articles of John Kempf, Harriet Mella and Jennie Love, as well as in the interview with Josh Sattin.
But not all of our messages are universal. You’ll hear conflicting views in this issue too. Josh Sattin and Jennie Love are devotees of deep-compost mulch, but John Kempf criticizes this method for the excess nutrients it brings in, which often lead to disease and pest issues.
As with growing asparagus, there are some practices that are self-evidently important and some that even professionals can disagree about. But this I know to be a fact: fresh asparagus is incredible. And that’s the view from the country.
