Inches a day

The thick spears of the first asparagus of the season--well, not the very first...those two were enjoyed last weekend--have arrived as of this week.  So crisp, tender, sweet and green, down to the very bottom, and such a world apart from any store-bought attempt at imitation...one of the rare delicacies of Spring, without a doubt, no matter what anyone says about the...smell.  They've been growing like gangbusters during the past few days...shooting up a half a foot or more during the course of a day.  Pretty amazing.

There was a little experiment conducted here, over the winter, involving the asparagus... A friend and I, after brewing up a batch of extra-extra hoppy beer, thought to throw the wort dregs out in the backyard somewhere, to see how they might evolve...So I went out and poured the whole sloppy mess onto the asparagus patch, only as a matter of convenience really since it was close to the walk and the snows were still quite deep back then, thinking it might provide them a little extra nourishment.  I'd thought the goop would just dissolve and sink into the ground, as the snow melted, but it turned out that instead it formed a sort of mat over the burgeoning points, and apparently didn't do them a lot of good, if any.  Those that were free of cover grew nice and tall and fat quite early on, while those that were under that somewhat ugly blanket of crustified hops seemed sort of stunted until I gave them a bit more air, and light.  They all seem to be doing fine now, although the ones that were under the hop gunk are a little on the spindly side and not coming along very well just yet.  I'm pretty confident they'll recover but I'm not really sure that was one of my better ideas.  

Anyway...that's all I've got for today.  It's been a hell of a week here, almost literally, and I am well past ready for a big mugful of incredibly restful slumber.  Ciao.