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The asparagus growers
United Kingdom
Thursday 29 May 2008
Elna and Doug Edgar and family of Innisfail planted another 43,500 baby crowns of asparagus this month.
That's five acres more than they had last year, for a total of 22 acres (nearly nine hectares) of the most delicious asparagus you're likely to eat, anywhere, anytime.
It's not exactly your average farm crop. Each one of the crowns with their long, dangly roots had to be hand-planted, but the results are worth the odd backache.
This farmland has been in the Edgar family for five generations, with the sixth generation, Mikalya and Megan Graham, already in residence.
Doug Edgar's great-grandfather William Edgar homesteaded this land when he arrived from Scotland back in 1907. If anybody had told him then that a century later his great-grandkids and their children would be growing asparagus and winning awards for their efforts, he'd have thought they'd been nipping at the single malt. That's precisely why Elna's first patch was planted on a back field, "So the neighbours wouldn't think we were crazy."
The Edgars' asparagus story goes back to 1986, when daughters Keri and Angie needed a university fund. "We were told we'd never grow asparagus successfully here," Elna recalls. "Based on a small patch in the garden that produced delicious asparagus, we decided to ignore the experts, try one acre, and see what happened."
What happened was a crop that yielded only about 20 per cent of what a California crop would yield, but there was a more important difference: it was sweet, juicy, loaded with flavour. In short, the best asparagus they'd ever tasted.
"We'll never get those huge, hot-climate crops here, not like they do in California," she says, because in central Alberta, the all-important heat units are never a sure thing.
"We average about 1,000 pounds per acre in a season. We could get 30 cases in a picking, or 250 -- it's all weather dependent."
That's five acres more than they had last year, for a total of 22 acres (nearly nine hectares) of the most delicious asparagus you're likely to eat, anywhere, anytime.
It's not exactly your average farm crop. Each one of the crowns with their long, dangly roots had to be hand-planted, but the results are worth the odd backache.
This farmland has been in the Edgar family for five generations, with the sixth generation, Mikalya and Megan Graham, already in residence.
Doug Edgar's great-grandfather William Edgar homesteaded this land when he arrived from Scotland back in 1907. If anybody had told him then that a century later his great-grandkids and their children would be growing asparagus and winning awards for their efforts, he'd have thought they'd been nipping at the single malt. That's precisely why Elna's first patch was planted on a back field, "So the neighbours wouldn't think we were crazy."
The Edgars' asparagus story goes back to 1986, when daughters Keri and Angie needed a university fund. "We were told we'd never grow asparagus successfully here," Elna recalls. "Based on a small patch in the garden that produced delicious asparagus, we decided to ignore the experts, try one acre, and see what happened."
What happened was a crop that yielded only about 20 per cent of what a California crop would yield, but there was a more important difference: it was sweet, juicy, loaded with flavour. In short, the best asparagus they'd ever tasted.
"We'll never get those huge, hot-climate crops here, not like they do in California," she says, because in central Alberta, the all-important heat units are never a sure thing.
"We average about 1,000 pounds per acre in a season. We could get 30 cases in a picking, or 250 -- it's all weather dependent."
