In Search of….anything but asparagus….

In Catalonia, we stalked shifty looking men in the woods, all clearly trying to avoid being followed, saw them emerging later from the scrub carrying scrawny, dangling wisps of green. The Wild Asparagus. Allegedly, the acme of a forager’s progress. And no-one was about to help us find it.

So, grow your own, I decide. The very first raised bed with which I replaced nursery benches as I journeyed towards retirement three years ago, I planted up with two-year old purple asparagus crowns. They said, you need to be patient to grow asparagus, but it will be worth waiting for. I have waited. I have ladled seaweed, imported from Fife and Angus beaches, over the bed twice a year. I have weeded more meticulously than is my habit, because the asparagus gurus say asparagus cannot tolerate weeds. I have fed the largely invisible plants. Now, it is May again, and still there’s nothing much to see here.

But there are alternatives. In spring the emerging spears of Solomon’s Seal, an enthusiastic wild member of the same family – Liliaceae – provide a luscious alternative; slightly more bitter but I’d argue all the better for that. No chewy tough bases to the spears, either. Their season is but a fortnight, and does not satisfy.

And REAL asparagus, they tell me, is better…. I do not believe them.

I WILL have shoots and spears in spring. I go to the clearing in the hazel copse, where annually the willow herb heaves itself through soil and its own winter debris, in the form of thickish shoots and red-brown, furled leaves. I pick the fattest and youngest and steam them, then sizzle in butter, Now these ARE bitter….and some are like toothpicks. I eat a plateful anyway.

Back to the garden, where five out of the original twelve asparagus crowns are showing single, unenthusiastic, skinny purple spears. I think, how many new potatoes could I be getting out of that bed? How much chard or broccoli or succulent fennel? A friend donates some asparagus seed, originally collected in Italy but bred in Perthshire over twenty years, to our seed library and puts pictures on Facebook of fists-full of fat, early spears in April. I sow the seed, to back up my shy and retiring crowns, who are now five years old. I discover that my friend’s grows itself, without fuss, in a polytunnel. So shall mine do.

Hop shoots call to me. Vigorous, ornamental, golden hops and the fatter, darker, beery ones, seething with alcoholic promise. All are edible and they taste great. They’re in the nettle family, and, like nettles, the more you pick the shoots, the more shoots come. I find that hops and nettles combined appeases me greatly.

Then up come the hostas. Fleshy, delicious, plumper than any asparagus but shorter too. I cut them before the leaves unfurl, but it’s not crucial: the leaves of this delectable Japanese vegetable are also very tasty and should never be consigned to a flower border. Although the flowers, when they come, are bonnie to look at as well. I remember that hostas are also in the lily family. They aren’t asparagus, but they’re close; and they’re easy to grow, reliable and pretty too.

After a moment’s thought, I cut two of the pathetic asparagus spears and add them to a dish of hosta. We get one spear each, but plenty of hosta shoots.

(Today I found someone is growing asparagus locally, commercially. It’s abundant, large and not too expensive. I’ve decided, if this year doesn’t reward my patience, that bed is going to be hostas next summer. And maybe the new seedlings in the polytunnel will one day give me payback!)