waiting for asparagus 25ful, the much- anticipated first real vegetable of the year. If the Europeans
could make a big deal of its arrival, we could too: we were waiting for as-
paragus.
/Two weeks before spring began on the calendar, I was outside with my
boots in the mud and my parka pulled over my ears, scrutinizing the as-
paragus patch. Four summers earlier, when Steven and I decided this
farm would someday be our permanent home, we’d worked to create the
garden that would feed us, we hoped, into our old age. “Creation” is a
large enough word for the sweaty, muscle- building project that took most
of our summer and a lot of help from a friend with earth- moving equip-
ment. Our challenge was the same one common to every farm in south-
ern Appalachia: topography. Our farm lies inside a U-shaped mountain
ridge. The forested hillsides slope down into a steep valley with a creek
running down its center. This is what’s known as a “hollow” (or “holler,” if
you’re from here). Out west they’d call it a canyon, but those have fewer
trees and a lot more sunshine.
At the mouth of the hollow sits our tin- roofed farmhouse, some cleared
fields and orchards, the old chestnut- sided barn and poultry house, and a
gravel drive that runs down the hollow to the road. The cabin (now our
guesthouse) lies up in the deep woods, as does the origin of our water
supply—a spring- fed creek that runs past the house and along the lane,
joining a bigger creek at the main road. We have more than a hundred
acres here, virtually all of them too steep to cultivate. My grandfather
used to say of farms like these, you could lop off the end of a row and let
the potatoes roll into a basket. A nice image, but the truth is less fun. We
tried cultivating the narrow stretch of nearly flat land along the creek, but
the bottomland between our tall mountains gets direct sun only from late
morning to mid- afternoon. It wasn’t enough to ripen a melon. For years
we’d studied the lay of our land for a better plan.
Eventually we’d decided to set our garden into the south- facing moun-
tainside, halfway up the slope behind the farmhouse. After clearing bram-
bles we carved out two long terraces that hug the contour of the hill—less
than a quarter of an acre altogether—constituting our only truly level