City Slicker

Emerald Delicacies

Jennifer visits an asparagus farm near Innisfail and finds herself knee-deep in green shoots and feeling a little Mediterranean

By Jennifer Cockrall-King

Asparagus likes loose, mineral-rich soil as well as hot days. It’s a Mediterranean plant, a member of the lily family, which is why I have to give myself a few seconds to realize that despite sand whipping in a fiery wind, I’m not in Greece. I’m in central Alberta. As I squint in the sun, I imagine that the windbreak of trees in the distance could be mistaken for a row of tall, slender Cyprus trees. OK, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch. But it’s definitely a surreal experience, arriving at the 17-acre (nearly seven-hectare) asparagus patch on Edgar Farms, about 10 kilometres west of Innisfail. Elna Edgar, keeper of the largest patch of asparagus in Alberta, explains that despite our northern exposure there’s enough warmth in the summer sun for a six- to eight-week season. And as her family quickly discovered, once you get a patch of asparagus going, there’s no stopping it, year after year.

I first met Elna Edgar a few years back at the Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market in Edmonton. She’d show up early in the growing season, the first weekend of May, often with mountains of emerald green and purple-tipped bunches of asparagus. What would ensue would be nothing short of a feeding frenzy. She’d replenish her market table constantly but within a few short hours, her stock would be cleaned out. Only jars of pickled asparagus tips and larger, more loosely packed bags of spears that were not perfectly straight would be left. (Wily shoppers would pick them up for soup or antipasto concoctions.)

Surprised by the fact that someone could grow asparagus in such abundance in Alberta, and heavily addicted to the sweet crunch of this freshly picked vegetable, I asked Elna if I could visit her farm one day. That’s how I find myself arriving at Edgar Farms on a hot summer morning.

I pull up to the farm and naively, I expect to see vast fields of spears from the road. Instead, I see grain silos, large sheds, rolling pasture and an impeccably manicured yard near the farmhouse. Elna, 52, greets me with a smile; petite, with her cell phone attached to her hip, she’s been up since about 5 a.m. I quickly learn why she needs the early start. Elna and Doug Edgar farm 1,400 acres (565 hectares) of wheat, barley and canola; the 17-acre asparagus patch and 25 acres (10 hectares) of pea and bush-bean patches. They also operate a cow-calf operation of 200 head for Edgar Farms’ “estate-raised” hormone- and antibiotic-free Angus beef, which she sells at the Calgary Farmer’s Market at Currie Barracks and on-farm throughout the year. The couple is active as founding members of the Innisfail Growers Co-Op, a five-family group that co-operatively markets and sells their produce at more than 25 locations between Edmonton and Calgary. In what little spare time she has, Elna makes relishes, chutneys and other sauces; assembles and freezes pies; pickles beans, asparagus and other odds and ends; and sells at the on-farm store. (Customers take what they want and leave the money in the “honesty box” which acts as a self-serve checkout.)

As she walks me through the property, I tell her how impressed I am with her ability to accomplish all of this, and still get up with the sun every day. She shrugs it off and tells me that she and her husband are fourth-generation farmers, born into the lifestyle. Still, slowing down has been on their minds in the past few years. But just as the couple began to struggle with the logistics of scaling down, maybe retiring, their daughter Keri, her husband, Randy, and their kids decided to move back to the farm. Elna’s grandchildren will be the sixth generation raised on this farm.

“All of the sudden we have a future,” Elna says, referring to the 100-year-old farm. “Keri grew up working on this farm, so she knows what she’s getting into.”

It was the Edgars’ two daughters, Keri and Angie, who prompted them to look at diversifying their farm with market vegetables 20 years ago. With two small children they wanted a bigger income for the family than the cow-calf and grain growing operation they were running. “When Doug and I got married, we’d get $3 per bushel of barley. The price now is around $2 a bushel,” explains Elna. (Barley prices fluctuate and are rising again.) Twenty years ago, they began to investigate the possibility of becoming market gardeners.

Now, as Elna and I stand in the sun-drenched asparagus patch, she’s explaining to me how, at first, they grew a wide variety of market vegetables, but soon realized that it was better to specialize. Keri and Angie decided to grow and sell peas; the extra income from that put them both through university. While her daughters’ pea and bean patches were taking off, Elna decided to give asparagus a try. In 1986, she planted a test patch. It takes the green plant four years to develop a significant harvest, so it was a while before Elna could even test the market. When she finally had her first harvest, she made a trip to the Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market in Edmonton. Within the first half-hour, she had sold everything she had. Astonished, she told the market manager: “I’ll be back in five years.”

“We planted another five acres every year for the next three years,” Elna says. “That was our best calculation of how much the Edmonton market could take.” We’re strolling between rows of asparagus, which if you strung them end-to-end, would amount to 27 kilometres.

Once it starts, the season is unpredictable and demanding. Asparagus pops up as early as the first week of May, or as late as the last day of the month. It’s also an intensive crop that demands daily picking. The spears will go to fern in a day if you don’t pick the stalks when they are ripe. “We have to go over the whole field every single day,” says Elna. She is glad the season ends in late June. As a fern, asparagus needs eight weeks of frost-free weather to feed and recharge its root system before winter. This is a welcome change of pace after several weeks of picking, driving to market and selling. Luckily, Doug has a creative side. He custom-built dune buggy-type carts so pickers can ride up and down the rows, snapping off and stacking sometimes hundreds of pounds of asparagus a day.

Another unpredictable part of asparagus farming is that the yield varies from day to day and week to week, making it a difficult crop to market to grocery chains. On average, Elna says they harvest about 450 kilograms per acre. But she’s picked as few as 55 and as many as 900 kilograms in one day. In warmer climates such as Peru, Chile and the U.S. where most imported asparagus comes from, farmers can get up to 2,250 kilograms per acre. “I knew that I couldn’t get the yield that other producers in warmer climates get. I can’t compete on price, so I compete on quality,” she explains.

Our relatively cool climate on the Prairies produces a very sweet vegetable. The purple colour in the tips indicates the sweetness. The darker it is, the sweeter it is. Eaten raw, asparagus should snap, be juicy and taste like fresh peas. Cooked, it should be full of flavour and have a nice firm texture. Elna takes me to the farm’s state-of-the-art chilling tanks and walk-in coolers at the end of my tour. The coolers ensure that Edgar Farms’ asparagus retains the natural sweetness and farm-fresh quality that distinguishes it from the limp, starchy well-travelled spears.

Elna and her crew pick only by hand. Each spear is snapped off rather than cut like most other commercially grown asparagus so customers don’t pay for wasted ends that need to be thrown away. And because it is not a common crop in central Alberta, Elna says, there are no concerns about disease. Edgar Farms have no need to use fungicides or insecticides, which is common in regions where intensive asparagus farming takes place.

She nearly always sells out at the markets, even though her asparagus is slightly more expensive than what is available year-round in grocery stores. But at $4.50 to $5 a bunch, it doesn’t require any trimming and the freshness and taste are beyond comparison. Don’t blink, or local asparagus season will be over.

By mid-July, the patch will be a feathery, pea-green sea that is a metre and a half high, as the spears have been left to “fern-out” in order to store their energy and nutrients before winter. The asparagus patch will rest, but Elna, her family and the farm’s 12 seasonal employees won’t. They will be up to their elbows in garden peas, pea shoots and green beans.