Asparagus, Me and Killdeer

The weather is beginning to remind me of aspargus season. When one has grown up with aspargus fields being part of one's life, it is apparent even without a calendar that it is time. I can feel it in the air. When I was a kid, the fields here in this area were full of aspargus. Nowadays, I can think of only two aspargus farmers left. While at the Covenant high school rummage sale this morning, I heard the wife of one of those farmers say they have disked the field and now it will be about a week before they pick the first of the vegetable for this year. After looking at the weather forecast, I would predict they will pick within four or five days. We are in for about that many warm days and that is what makes those green heads push out of the ground and grow like mad. It has been said many a time, when it is hot, one can watch the asparagus grow.

I was five and my dad had planted about two and a half acres of aspargus. He then purchased a two seat aspargus picker. There were my mom and dad for the picker but who would drive the tractor to pull it? Me, of course. I was five so should able to pull my part of thewight of family responsibility. Dad had to build up the clutch with blocks so that I could reach the pedals. Asparagus is planted in rows so there is a specific area over which one drives a tractor. To go either right or left too far leads the tractor and then the picker directly through the asparagus. That just could not be. My dad will yell, "Keep the pot over the middle of the row!". There was a grease pot for what I think was the base of the steering wheel. It hung directly over the center of the row so it was a good guide. Driving a tractor at the speed of five miles an hour can get very boring and a little kid's five year old mind wandered and then the yelling would start. I knew there were bad consequences if I drove over green stuff that would be turned into greener stuff with which we would pay bills.

Over the years, I have had many memorable experiences with asparagus picking. The warm mornings were no challenge but those cold, windy, rainy days were the pits. One would freeze. The picking had to be done before school in the mornings. Almost every kid worth his weight in salt picked asparagus. Asparagus fields offered so many kids jobs that the schools began the school day at ten instead of eight during asparagus season. During late April, May and June...this town talked asparagus.

As my siblings gained in age and stature, they, too, joined the effort. It developed into family bonding time. Later, my dad hired a neighborhood friend of mine and that made the effort all the more sweet. There was a bigger crew that worked across the ditch from our field and many of those were older boys. I recall hating to meet them at the end of the rows because as we rode away on our next row, we could hear them poking fun of us young girls.

The smells of those days linger....the asparagus smell.....sweaty rubber gloves......tractor exhaust...the warm earth........and the hot breakfast that would await us when we returned to the house.

Oh, yes, my remembrances wouldn't be complete without mentioning my father's other piece of asparagus picking advice. "Get those fingers down to the ground. We don't want big stumps left to stub our fingers on the next time". His meaning was to pick the asparagus stalk as close to the ground as possible. There was truth in that we didn't want stumps to pick around the next time and the time after that but I knew there was a deeper meaning. We were paid by the pound. An asparagus stalk is fatter on the bottom than the top so the lower we picked the stalk...the more it weighed........thus......the more we made.

Even as late as when my husband and I had three children, asparagus was part of life. When our eldest began Christian school, we figured out a way to pay for it would be asparagus. We rented a couple of fields and the kids and I picked the fields by hand. We didn't have the fields or the picker so had to do things the old fashioned way. Our kids were five, three and one at the time. Lauri, the one year old, slept in the car while we picked. Those little kids lugged along with me as I bent over and picked each of those little green stalks. They helped as much as they could and we paid off the kindergarten bill. We did that for a couple of years and by that time, it was getting more difficult to find a market for the vegetable so we had to find other ways to pay for Christian education. It never did get easy, but there was always a way. God was faithful.

One of the most delightful experiences of riding the picker was that every year we would find a nest in the ground of killdeer. They are pretty birds, brown and white with black bands on their chest. They have a funny and distinctive way of walking the ground so are unmistakenable. Soon their nest would fill with two or three eggs. Innately, mama bird would try to lead us away from her nest by fluffing herself up in hopes of scaring us away. With sadness we watched the mom fly away with obvious fear each time we came by to return to her eggs as soon as we were past. We hated to disturb that mother bird. This went on until one day, that nest was full of little birds with open mouths. It was great fun to watch them turn into full fledge birds and soon fly away to live their own lives.

My youngest chick was here for a visit this week. Today, she left to go home to her husband some one hundred miles away. As difficult as it is for both of us, she is on to live her own life as well.

Note the picture....asparagus stalk in background and three killdeer eggs in a ground nest in the foreground.