Rhubarb, Strawberries and Asparagus: Planting Foods of the Frontier

This weekend we planted two of our 12″ x 4″ raised beds with Strawberries and Asparagus. The rhubarb will be in at the feed store in early March to fill the third. Many pioneers and settlers brought dormant asparagus and rhubarb crowns and seeds with them to plant on their homesteads because they transported well and produced food in varied climates. I once found rhubarb growing along a creek by a homestead cabin foundation  and ancient asparagus flowering away in a fallow field in Idaho’s River of No Return Wilderness. In Alaska, homesteaders often plant rhubarb and strawberries as they are one of the few vitamin-c sources they can grow in the extreme climate. I also have a clump of my great-grandmother’s rhubarb growing in my garden that I have been moving around with me from garden to garden for the last decade. Strawberries were an important food of the North American frontier as well, and so well loved as a wild food that they were cultivated in homestead gardens. These hardy plants have quite a history of sustaining hardy folks!

I really enjoy Willa Cather’s description of a homestead garden in this passage of O Pioneers! : 
“One September afternoon Alexandra had gone over to the garden across the draw to dig sweet potatoes–they had been thriving upon the weather that was fatal to everything else. But when Carl Linstrum came up the garden rows to find her, she was not working. She was standing lost in thought, leaning upon her pitchfork, her sunbonnet lying beside her on the ground. The dry garden patch smelled of drying vines and was strewn with yellow seed-cucumbers and pumpkins and citrons. At one end, next the rhubarb, grew feathery asparagus, with red berries. Down the middle of the garden was a row of gooseberry and currant bushes. A few tough zenias and marigolds and a row of scarlet sage bore witness to the buckets of water that Mrs. Bergson had carried there after sundown, against the prohibition of her sons. Carl came quietly and slowly up the garden path, looking intently at Alexandra. She did not hear him. She was standing perfectly still, with that serious ease so characteristic of her. Her thick, reddish braids, twisted about her head, fairly burned in the sunlight. The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one’s back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky. Even Carl, never a very cheerful boy, and considerably darkened by these last two bitter years, loved the country on days like this, felt something strong and young and wild come out of it, that laughed at care.”