On Sunday I was feeding the chooks fairly early in the morning and thought to check the asparagus for some early spears. I was delighted to see the first ones poking through their bed. What a great indicator of the arrival of spring.
They were snapped off, given a quick boil, annointed with butter and a dash of home grown lemon and then served up within the hour for Chantelle's breakfast.
I snuck one off the plate just to make sure it was edible ... and it was very nice. So the asparagus bed is on the daily circuit to see how the rest of the crop is coming on. Home gardening is in one sense very inefficient, as you put in a huge amount of "work" for often a very poor yield. There are so many threats and obstacles in the way of any one crop coming to fruition. For example, I can plant up a whole bed of raspberries, manure them, prune them, lime them, keep them weeded and watered all the year. If I fail to stick a net over them then I will lose 99% of the crop to song thrushes and blackbirds. Often your entire crop of one veggy fails for no obvious reason one year and then does really well the next.
Hence my delight at getting some produce onto the plate in tip-top condition.
