The asparagus came up.

This bed has been in the ground since 2021 — ‘Gijnlim’ from store-bought roots and ‘Mary Washington’ grown from seed, tucked into a small raised bed along with spare strawberries and a sprinkling of leaf lettuce. It took a couple of years before it produced anything worth cutting at all, and even now the harvest is modest. A handful of spears here and there, May into June, enough for a side dish or two if nobody gets greedy.

Someone got greedy.

Five spears came up in late May. Decent-sized, for once. Not as chunky as those store-bought ones, but sturdy enough that I felt I was finally doing something right. I cut them and put them on the kitchen scale — 61 grams. That’s barely a garnish. But after months of the hungry gap, of frozen kale and imported blueberries eaten guiltily at the sink, 61 grams of something green and fresh from my own garden felt like a fortune.

I trimmed them, halved them, and stood at the stove thinking about what to do with 61 grams of asparagus. The answer turned out to be the simplest thing I could think of: melt some butter in the pan, cook the asparagus until it gets a little char, push it aside, fry two eggs sunny-side-up in the same butter. Slide it all onto a plate. Squeeze of lemon. Salt. Pepper. Done.

It was perfect. Not because the recipe was special — there is no recipe, it’s butter and eggs and vegetables — but because I grew it. Those five spears came out of a bed I built, from crowns that have been quietly building root mass for four years. The fried egg was just a frame for the asparagus, and the asparagus was everything.

Then my son appeared. This is what happens when you cook asparagus in a small house — the smell reaches the living room in about ninety seconds.

“Can I have some?” He ate the tips. All of them. Picked them right off the spears and left me the woody ends like a tiny, efficient asparagus sommelier. I don’t even know where he learned to like asparagus — I’ve been too cheap to buy it at the store, where it runs €8 to €12 per kilo. My best guess is he tasted it off my plate at a restaurant years ago and filed the flavor away until the garden produced enough to trigger the memory.

A few days later, another small harvest. I made the same dish again. He stole the tips again. We have established a pattern.

Needless to say, I was going to need a bigger asparagus bed.

I went online and found a nursery in the Netherlands offering asparagus crowns on sale — green (‘Fruhlim’) and purple (‘Erasmus’) varieties, bare-root, ready to ship. Turns out their end of season happens to be our planting time. An unexpected bonus for cold climate gardening, but one I was happy to roll with. I ordered thirty.

They arrived in a cardboard box with Dutch shipping labels and dirt still clinging to them, and I planted them into new beds alongside strawberry runners that needed rehoming anyway. Companion planting — the strawberries act as living mulch, keeping weeds down and moisture in. The asparagus gives light wind protection. Both are perennials. Both produce for years. I plant once and harvest twice, from the same bed, for the next decade.

The strawberry plants came from runners I’d pulled up while weeding the paths earlier that week. Nothing on this property goes to waste if I can help it.

Thirty crowns cost about sixty euros. Once they’re established — year three, maybe year four — I should be getting several kilos per season from thirty plants. At store prices, that’s the crowns paying for themselves in the second real harvest and producing for free for the next twenty years.

My son will be stealing tips off my plate possibly for as long as he’s under our roof, and he has no idea what that means in euros. It means I’m never buying asparagus at Prisma again.