Sunday afternoon turned out to be the occasion for an annual ritual at our house, namely the burning of the asparagus field. This is an acre or so of land into which we planted several thousand asparagus crowns eight years ago.

We allowed ourselves this indulgence because we like asparagus a lot and we had this idle field sitting there. We found a place in Oklahoma that sold asparagus crowns by the gunny sack, plowed up the field and spent a weekend on our hands and knees.

Our friends thought we were crazy, and they were probably right.

The soil in that field isn’t the best, and we only sort of knew what we were doing when we planted all those crowns. Probably only a third of what we put in the ground actually took. But since we aren’t doing anything commercially with the crop, we achieved our most immediate goal, which was having all the asparagus we could hope to eat.

By putting a crop on the field, we also were able to reclassify its tax status to agricultural, which slashed the cost of holding a vacant piece of land to almost nothing.

This was not our intention going in. We had already planted the asparagus when the idea came to me one day, during my former life as a working journalist, when I was sitting through one of those interminable county commission discussions on property taxes. When the next tax bill arrived, I scheduled an appeal, showed the nice hearing officer the receipt for all our asparagus crowns and left having been officially proclaimed a farmer.

Asparagus, being a perennial, is the gift that keeps on giving. I read somewhere that a stand of asparagus will produce for 30 or 40 years, but there are plenty of farmsteads with patches older than that. It’s also likely that many of the “wild” asparagus patches along roadsides got their start in someone’s garden, who knows how long ago.

This makes asparagus the ideal garden crop or agricultural endeavor. You plant it once and it’s yours.

The main problem with having an asparagus patch spread over so large a space is weeding. Most people who have a lot of asparagus weed it chemically, but we don’t. Mowing is out, because the ferns need to be left standing to feed the roots, so at the end of the summer the field is fairly overgrown. We let the weeds die and then, after the first of the following year, we burn the field.

Technically, this burning thing should be done in February, before green vegetation starts to show under the brown weeds. However, procrastination, dry conditions and too many windy weekends sometimes push the date a bit further into spring. If you wait too long, you may scorch or braise, if you prefer the tips of the spears before they pop through the soil.

This was not the first time that we had burned the field on Easter. As I was standing there Sunday afternoon guarding the treeline from flame, I recalled one of our early experiments with controlled pyromania, when the wind shifted abruptly and we smoked out a nearby Easter egg hunt.

Country neighbors are a tolerant lot.

Happily, we have never been joined by the Willow Springs Township Volunteer Fire Department at one of these burnings, and the neighbors’ grandchildren are probably too old to hunt Easter eggs anymore, so Sunday was about as uneventful as a grass fire can get.

Now we simply wait for the payoff, which will emerge within the next couple of weeks.

When she’s not writing about foods and gardening, Gwyn Mellinger is teaching journalism at Baker University. Her phone number is (785) 594-4554.