Asparagus season is underway, so now is the perfect time to enjoy the season's first local harvest.

Asparagus plants grown from seed take three years to produce spears. Many growers plant one-year-old crowns (a string mop-like central group of stems surrounded by finger-like roots) to harvest their first crop sooner. Once established, crowns can produce for 20 years or longer.

Crowns send up multiple spears. The hotter the weather, the faster they'll grow — sometimes 25 centimetres in 24 hours. On hot, humid days, they can be harvested twice a day.

"You start at one part of the field, and you keep picking from when the sun comes up until you've picked the field. Then the next day you just start over again," said Tim Barrie, owner of Barrie's Asparagus Farm, near Cambridge, Ont.

Barrie

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