Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories.
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When I was a kid, during the 1930s and 1940s, we had a wonderful vegetable garden behind our barn on West Fifth Street. Over the years, I think we grew just about every vegetable I can think of with one exception – asparagus. My mother said it was a perennial and it took up too much space in the garden.
Then one day in late Fall, she decided to have asparagus for dinner. In those days, grocery stores couldn’t always get fresh asparagus year around, as they can today. So she opted for canned asparagus. I don’t know if you have ever eaten canned asparagus, but it was awful. There was very little taste and it was soft and mushy. I vowed never again to eat asparagus. But today it is one of my favorite vegetables. So how did that happened?
It was just a coincidence. You see, during the 1960s, I began collecting prehistoric Indian artifacts, and I collected them for about 30 years. But what did my artifact collecting have to do with asparagus? You see, I found those Indian artifacts by walking through central Ohio farm fields where prehistoric Indians once lived and where they made their stone tools. The soil still contained a lot of their handiwork. Each year some of it is brought to the surface by the farmer’s plow.
But it wasn’t just Indian artifacts that I found. Much to my surprise, I often found myself standing in a nice patch of asparagus. It was growing wild in those farm fields!
You see, the tiny fruit that grows on the asparagus foliage is a favorite food for many birds. They devour the fruit and deposit the tiny seeds on the soil, creating asparagus patches here and there. Some of the patches were small, while others were very large.
I also found many asparagus patches growing at the side of the road. One of those patches not far from Marysville was about 15 feet wide and 30 or 40 feet long. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of asparagus sprouts growing in that area. I got a few paper bags and filled them with the sprouts. Then I gave them to friends and neighbors. Of course I kept one bag for us, because we all loved that wild asparagus.
Today, maybe 60 years later, when I eat asparagus, I sometimes think of all the artifacts I found in those farm fields. It was a nice collection. There were stone axes, hammer stones and celts. There were banner stones and flat weights. There were all sorts of flint objects, spear points, arrowheads and knives. There were flint drills and slate gorgets. You can see much of the collection today at the Union County Historical Society on West Sixth Street. They have the artifacts, but they don’t have any asparagus.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at williamboyd514@gmail.com