IN THE FIELD

It’s a spring afternoon in the middle of asparagus season, and I’m crouching in a field with Jim Durst, an organic farmer in California’s Yolo County, northwest of Sacramento. Here and there green spears poke upward through the dirt. These asparagus will be picked tomorrow; they can grow whole inches overnight. “It looks totally different in the morning,” Jim tells me. “It looks like a little forest of trees, sticking up. And after they harvest, it looks like somebody logged it.”

Asparagus is a member of the lily family, so it has very extensive root systems. It grows mostly along waterways. The roots can go down about anywhere from twelve to twenty feet.

The warmer soil temperature stimulates growth, so as soon as it warms up in the spring, the spears start to emerge. We harvest every day, because the spears can grow two to three inches a day. The spear is actually a branch trying to get up and get going. Once you cut a spear off, the plant sends up another shoot. So harvesting stimulates production—it keeps it going. During the harvest time, we are cutting the field every day. We harvest particularly spears of a certain height, ’cause that’s what we put in our box. The market determines that to be nine and a half inches.

via Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Asparagus* | Lucky Peach.