Published Friday, April 9, 2021

Asparagus.

I like asparagus. Metric Man? He’ll give it a pass.
 
He gives most veggies a pass. Peas, broccoli, cauliflower, squash, Brussel sprouts, he gives them all a pass in favor of corn. Maybe string beans, carrots and the occasional beet. Boring. Back to asparagus.

This member of the fern family can be tricky to grow. Tricky and slow, very slow. Not to mention hard to find in Costa Rica and I’ve been looking. Just recently, it has started showing up at our local feria from places unknown, but today it appeared as locally grown and harvested spears. Not that I bought any, because I didn’t, I was far too interested in the wavy ferny-looking plants in bags this fine farmer had for sale. Foolish fellow was letting them go for 1500c a bag. I took two.

I don’t think that Maicol Leroy realized what a prize he was selling. There are gringos among us who would have paid twice that much for real live rooted asparagus plants. We have been looking for them for years and there he was blithely selling them – cheap! Maicol runs the Indio Pelado farm across the lake from us. They actually have enough asparagus to dig some up and sell! What a guy.

So, what’s the big deal? Why are we short on a funky ferny veggie? Time and sheer orneriness.

Asparagus likes to be pampered. It likes a deeply dug vegetable bed with lots of manure. It likes acidic soil. It wants the right amount of sun and shade, the right amount of rain. The plants like top-dressing and fertilizer. If you buy seeds, you are in for a long wait. Seeds, to the initiated, mean that no matter how ferny the plant looks it is not a fern. Ferns don’t make seeds.

The folksy name for asparagus is “sparrow grass” and that’s what it is. A grass. A delicious grass that is pretty enough to be a background plant in the flowerbed. Back to the veggie part.

Growing the plant from seed can be tedious as it takes a long time to get a producing bed. Putting in plants means waiting two or three years for them to really get started, so I don’t even want to think about starting from seed. That’s two or three years of babying your bedded plants, watching them produce edibles and not harvesting them. Imagine the patience! And that’s not even considering the possible disasters like weather that’s too wet or too dry while you’re out of town for two weeks. Grrr.

So, good drainage, manure, deep digging, water, sun . . . Check back with me in two years and I’ll tell you how it’s going.

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Editor's note: More information on this article or about gardening, Ms. Victoria Torley, gardener columnist, can be reached at victoriatorley1@gmail.com