The white oak trees behind our home produced a bumper crop of acorns last fall. I didn’t think much about it, figuring that such plenty would result in a happy and healthy gray squirrel population. When the tree leaves dropped, our asparagus patch snuggled in for the winter.
Fast-forward to late March. The squirrels are fat. Not much is going on in the garden, located just behind and below the house.
I did a double-take when I saw the first dogwoods blooming in our back woods, and then rushed to the asparagus patch, which generally comes to life about the same time as the white dogwood flowers. Sure enough, I saw, poking up through the leaves, a half-dozen stalks—including one nearly a foot tall. I fetched a rake from the shed and gently pulled back the leaf mulch. The tines did not move the acorns covering the ground beneath the damp leaves. The little buggers had rooted! I tugged at one of them with my fingers, and it took quite a bit of effort to extract the six-inch long oak root. I pulled off the acorn top and a tiny oak leaf unfurled. I eyed the two rows of asparagus and could almost feel them suffocating.
“Barry,” I shouted to my husband. “If we don’t want a forest in the asparagus patch, we need to get busy!”
It took us hours to clean out the invaders, as we carefully extracted by hand each tiny tree without damaging the emerging spears.
Perhaps the rescued vegetables felt grateful. They rewarded us with a yummy meal—the first harvest of the season, and the first taste of our labors in the now three-year-old patch. It was definitely worth the wait!
#WorthTheWait #asparagus #roots #spears
Photo by Keegan Houser on Unsplash
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