Asparagus Patch

      April is the cruelest month, says T. S. Eliot.  Awakening from winter’s hibernation, there are a lot of things that have to be done.  One chore is rescuing the asparagus bed from dead fronds and tumbleweeds.  (I realize that in most of the world, asparagus is a weed that you gather from the fence rows and roadsides, but not here in the semi-desert.  You have to cultivate the weed if you want fresh asparagus in May.  The snow fence captures a great drift, if there is any snow, and that is all the “irrigation” it gets. )

 

 

    Usually, I break out the Ford tractor, hook up the rotary mower, and run it as low as I can which chops off the stocks and pretty much minces the dead branches into a light shallow mulch, and even stirs up a little dirt and kills a few early emerging weeds.

 

 

  Still a little snow lying around and a lot of mud, so too wet for that maneuver.  Out come the tools that must have been around since the iron age—the pitchfork and the scythe.

 

     The scythe really didn’t cut much.  The dead asparagus stems pulled out of the wet ground and the tumbleweeds stacked up.  A little pitchfork work, and voila!

 

 

     It’s not as flat and clean as the mower would leave it, but it’s done and there aren’t any tractor tracks.  It will be easy to spot the spears when they begin to emerge.

     The time was that my mother would spend an hour a day hoeing in the patch.  When I got out of school in May, I could spend a couple of hours with shovel and hoe to finish the job.  So we had an “all-natural” product—no herbicides.  Not enough time for that any more, so I have to resort to a pre-emergence herbicide, and later, spot spray with grass killers, like Roundup before the spears appear, or other marvelous things that can actually be sprayed on the asparagus (and irises, too) that kills the grass and not the desired plants.

     Sorry you organic folk, it has some chemical on it.  At my age, the chemical probably won’t kill me, I guess.  An early spring treat is a batch of steamed fresh asparagus, even if  you have to cheat and use chemicals.

 

     One drawback of not using the mower—the leftover residue.  It won’t stay piled like that for long.  The right wind will have it crammed up against the fence again. 

     It was a wet day, almost foggy.

 

     Time for another old tool, the kitchen match.  Actually, I had to use a propane torch to get anything to start.

 

   

 An accelerant became a necessity, too--$3.56 per gallon gasoline.

 

 It won’t blow away or stack up in the fence row now.

 

 

 If the tulips come, can the asparagus be far behind?