A small paradox of vegetable gardening is that you commit yourself to building the soil but not to keeping the individual plants within it for a decent length of time. Sure, you might keep the genetic material of the plants between seasons by selecting and saving seeds, but there is no need to keep the same vegetable alive for more than is necessary.

Being good at vegetable gardening is only about keeping plants alive for a short length of time. Whether you fail or succeed, it comes about very quickly.

There aren’t many plants in the vegetable garden that you wantto last forever – but the most obvious of the perennial vegetables comes into season right now: asparagus. Planting asparagus is a marker that you’re going to stay in the same place for a while. It doesn’t tend to bear any of the succulent stems in the first year that they’re planted but the plants can last for up to 30 years. Over this period, the asparagus plants develop a dense 'crown' of tuberous roots – and as they age, the plants become high yielding and nigh on impossible to kill.

The first spears of the season are an indicator that spring has arrived – mine came up as if to a perfect calendar schedule on the first of September.

This is my second spring in this garden (here is last year) and I’m going to roughly yield twice as much as the previous year thanks to more water, better soil and my complete disregard to the correct spacing of plants as marked on the seed packet. You can cram in a whole lot more than is specified. I still haven’t quite worked out how to space out the time between plantings so that I can ensure a constant supply of vegetables – everything seems to come into season in a single monstrous onslaught of food that I give away or furiously bottle and pickle. The commitment to the garden is also a commitment to processing: putting aside the time to peel, boil, sterilise and bottle.

If you’re looking for something to do with a mountain of asparagus, try these asparagus recipes.