Foraging for Wild Asparagus! (AND something I've never seen before!)

So it's May 15th. This is when I usually come up and check for asparagus. I don't think it's quite ready yet. I saw just a couple of tiny spears. It's May 21st and I'm back checking for the asparagus and I see it has popped up here. It's been so hot. So I'm going to pick some asparagus for supper. I'm going to serve it with salmon. So I'm going to show you this asparagus that has popped up above the grass line here. So this is old asparagus. It's gone to seed. So what you do is you look for this and then in the spring, you look around the base. Excuse the wind. I don't have a microphone here, but you look at the base and there's some new asparagus spears. Beautiful. Nice and sweet. Here's some right here. How do I get it in my shadow? There we are. This one. It's kind of gotten a little bit long. Starting to go to seed a little bit, but I'm going to pick it anyway. Still tastes good. When I pick asparagus, I don't bring a knife. I just actually break it off. A basket. Remove the grass out of the way. Reveals some asparagus. So you don't want to be stomping around the area where the old stuff was. You want to be careful. It is boiling hot. My face is beet red, but I absolutely love this place. My mom used to bring us up here and she used to forage for asparagus and she showed me what to look for. So I haven't missed a season, I don't think ever, unless I was a baby, but my mom probably brought me with her then too. So every May I look forward to wild asparagus and I don't buy it any other time in the year. So it's such a treat when I do get it. And the other thing I love about this area is Lily of the Valley. So this is everywhere, all over the place, and all you can smell is Lily of the Valley perfume. They are so pretty. I always pick these for my daughter. She's with me picking asparagus and I always pick some and put them on the table for her. So they're so pretty. And the other thing to watch out for too when you are picking wild asparagus is poison ivy. I get it every year and it's just starting on my arm there. I think I've got some underneath too, but to me it's worth it. I'm back out here, it is May 28th and it is freezing. The last time I was here it was boiling and today it's cold. It's really damp and it was snowing this morning. So that's weather in Ontario for you I guess. But I'm back here looking for asparagus and I am finding some. Some of it's gone to seed, but I'm just rooting around here and hopefully I'll get enough for supper. Here's a nice spear right there. Here's a stalk of asparagus that is going to seed. This is about four feet high now and you can see this is kind of like the first stage of it going. It'll kind of come out with these branches here and then it will turn into kind of like a little, looks like a lime green fern with little fronds on it. Here is some asparagus that's gone to seed. It's been knocked over, but you can see that they have little tiny flowers. Asparagus actually is, the plants come in male and female and you can actually tell the difference between the plants. They basically look the same. The spears of the male asparagus plant are generally bigger and there's more of them. We're going to look at the flower here. You can see that this one, I'll have to get really close here. In that flower, it's very hard to see, excuse my dry hands, but there's a green ovary and a little yellowish pistil. That's the female flower. I'm going to show you what the male flowers look like. This particular plant is male. Here's an example of the male flower with the orangish-yellow stamen in the middle. There's a better shot. You can see the stamen up a little bit closer. That's what's needed to pollinate the female flowers to create those seed berries. Here's an example of a female plant. This is from last year. It's dried up, but you can see the berries on it. These berries will contain seeds and the amount of seeds that are in there are just berries. This is what they look like. This little seed berry had three seeds in it. In order for the female plant to produce these berries, there has to be a male plant around it somewhere because the female and the male plants, they both have flowers, but you need to have the male present to pollinate the female flowers to create these seed berries. There, you can see that they were red from last year. They will turn red in the fall. They start off green, and then they will turn red in the fall, and that's when you harvest them for the seed. You cannot eat these berries. They're toxic, but you can collect the seed from them, and you can grow your own asparagus. When you plant these seeds, it'll take three years for your asparagus to be ready to be harvested. You'll get an asparagus spear the first year, but you should never pick the asparagus after the first year. You need to establish healthy crowns and strong roots and crowns for your plants. I just found a patch of asparagus that I've never seen before. I slammed on the brakes on my way home when I saw it, but I want to show you this. I've never seen this before either. I see a whole bunch of asparagus, last year's asparagus, dead and flopped over. Most of it does not have any berries, which tells me that it is likely mostly male. I do see one berry on one plant here, so I know that one's female, but look at that. They're like tree trunks. Usually the male plants, they produce more, and they are thicker. I've never seen ones this thick before, but the males, they don't have to send their energy to create the berries, so it sends the energy to produce stalks. Anyway, I guess this looks like a male-dominated asparagus area, so here's one here that I can pick. That is huge. Yeah, so they're all quite big, so this patch, crowns of these asparagus plants must be really old. I cannot believe that, I've never seen them this big before. So that's what I saw poking up out of the ditch. So that was successful, I collected enough asparagus for about two meals, and that last little surprise where I got that one, I just had to pick that because that's probably historical asparagus that I just found. So I think my asparagus foraging is coming to a close for the season. Some of it's starting to go to seed, but I could probably go back and scrounge up enough for maybe one or two meals here and there. I hope you found today's video helpful, if you did, please consider subscribing and hit that like button, and I'll see you again next time.