Asparagus: Not completely Awful

We had our first batch of asparagus this evening with dinner. Actually, it's my first asparagus ever. I've seen it on the menu before but with stomachs having limited room, it never made it high enough on the list to actually be tried. It's a fern and I'm not sure people are supposed to eat ferns. However, the same kind of thinking would have kept me from enjoying mushrooms on my pizza since fungus seems like it belongs on the "do not eat" list too. So, being an open minded kind of guy, I figured that after 37 years of avoiding it, I'd try Asparagus.

Wow, it looks like a picture in a magazine!
(until you notice the plastic disposable cup
in the upper right corner.
I moved the Styrofoam plates and the
Bounty paper towel "napkins" to make it look
more classy.)

I followed a simple recipe I found online and blanched the asparagus before cooking on the stove with a little butter and garlic. My wife said they were the best she's ever had. My 8 year old daughter had a second helping. My 15 month old son once ate a cricket so his opinion on food should be considered with skepticism but he ate it too. I didn't hate them as much as I thought I would.

Now, I went into this thing understanding it wasn't going to taste like a bacon cheeseburger, so in all fairness, the bar wasn't really set very high. Taking that into consideration, the asparagus really wasn't that bad. If they were served to me when I was a guest in someone's home, I could probably eat them to be polite and not even make yucky faces.

A few more garden notes: My strawberries are starting to flower. I put in the strawberry patch last spring and pinched off all the flowers last year so they'd put out runners and new plants instead of making fruit. This year, I get to have strawberries. This is another thing I've never grown and I'm curious to see how it pans out.

strawberry flowers

My grapes are starting to get some leaves. The vines are 4 years old this year. I had 3 vines last year and got grapes for the first time. I have a red seedless, purple seedless, and green seedless variety. The red seedless has seeds so who knows what that really is. We had more grapes last year than we could eat and I added 3 seeded varieties last spring so we should have even more this year.

grape vines getting leaves

The problem with grapes is they're only good fresh. I've never heard of freezing or canning grapes. Since you eat them fresh, you have to eat them when they're ripe and grapes ripen over about 2 weeks. If you only end up with 10 lbs of grapes, you've got 2 weeks to eat them so you better like grapes.

And finally, my apple trees are in bloom. These are the two 5-in-1 apple grafts that have 5 different varieties grafted onto one trunk and are supposed to produce 5 varieties on each tree.

Apple blossoms

Last year, only the golden delicious branches had any apples. This year it looks like almost every branch has flowers. Maybe I will get more than one variety. I was pretty skeptical about this working out. In fact, I was so skeptical that I put 2 regular apple trees in this year in case my 5-in-1's turned out to be a dud. We'll see.