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Edition: U.S. / Global

N.Y. / Region

New Jersey Dining | Asparagus

It’s No Tomato, but a Stalk Gets Some Respect

Aaron Houston for The New York Times

Maya Mount, 7, the granddaughter of the owners at Terhune Orchards, helps with the picking of asparagus.

WINSLOW TOWNSHIP, N.J.

Snapping Them Up

Buying asparagus where it grows:

PRINCETON Terhune Orchards, 330 Cold Soil Road; terhuneorchards.com or (609) 924-2310. Pick-your-own asparagus available 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily; an on-site market and adjacent winery are open during the same hours. Terhune expects to sell its own asparagus through late May, depending on the weather.

WINSLOW TOWNSHIP Parzanese Brothers Farm, 595 Spring Road; (609) 561-5586. Open to asparagus buyers 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. The farm expects to sell its own asparagus until early June.

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Aaron Houston for The New York Times

POKING UP At Terhune Orchards in Princeton, many customers snap off asparagus themselves.

Aaron Houston for The New York Times

The crop is also sold in bunches at the on-site store at Terhune Orchards.

Aaron Houston for The New York Times

Salvatore Parzanese, forefront, an owner at Parzanese Brothers Farm, fills a crate.

Aaron Houston for The New York Times

A picking tool.

ON an overcast morning late last month, Fran Bickel pulled into the combination market and packing plant at Parzanese Brothers Farm here with one thing on her mind: asparagus soup with goat cheese and basil.

“It’s a Giada recipe,” Ms. Bickel said, referring to the TV chef Giada De Laurentiis. Even if the recipe had not inspired a hankering for soup, Ms. Bickel would have taken the 50-minute drive from her home in Ocean City anyway, she said.

“The asparagus here is more flavorful and handles better than anything you can get from the grocery store,” Ms. Bickel said. “Plus, I like to buy local.”

Among farm-to-table cooks and those who sit down to dinner with them, asparagus heralds the start of the season’s bounty in New Jersey, with the first dusky green stalks poking up in mid-April and the season winding down in late May or early June, depending on the weather.

At Parzanese Brothers Farm, where a one-pound bunch sells for $2, 42 of its 250 acres are reserved for asparagus, according to Salvatore Parzanese, 52, an owner with his brothers, Paul and Louis, all of Winslow Township. But “every year it’s getting bigger and bigger,” he said. “People like to be able to come right here and buy it.”

Mr. Parzanese also sells to produce markets within a 15-mile radius and to Zone 7, a distribution service in Lawrenceville that connects farmers and chefs.

At Terhune Orchards, in Princeton, many customers leave the premises confident that their stalks were attached to the earth not long before, because they snap each one off themselves. This is the second consecutive season in which the farm has opened its two acres of asparagus fields to pick-your-own customers. (The asparagus costs $3.25 per pound, the same price charged in the on-site market.)

“We’ve been getting calls since the beginning of April from people wanting to come back and pick, homely as these fields are,” said Pam Mount, who runs the 200-acre property with her husband, Gary, and daughter Tannwen, all of Princeton. Unlike orchards, asparagus tracts — plots of dirt sparsely pocked with 7- to 10-inch green spires — are not pretty.

But “there’s a special mystique to asparagus, because it’s really the first crop,” Ms. Mount, 67, said during a recent tour, when the first purple-tipped spears of the season stabbed skyward, ready to be snapped at the fibrous base.

Like Parzanese Brothers, Terhune is not a major asparagus producer. Both farms’ asparagus finds its way to New Jersey restaurants like Eno Terra in Kingston and Due Mari in New Brunswick, as well as to local markets, but the bulk of Terhune’s business is in apples and other fruits and vegetables, Ms. Mount said.

That is partly because of the difficulty of growing asparagus. “It’s really labor intensive,” she said. “Everything has to be cut by hand.” In addition, once planted, an asparagus field requires three years to produce a crop.

Terhune got a head start 10 years ago by cultivating asparagus roots produced by Walker Brothers Inc., a 300-acre farm in Pittsgrove that also produces asparagus seeds, with the bulk sent to Peru, Mexico and states including California and Washington.

The roots offer “a head start on the plant, so you’re a year closer to producing,” said Scott Walker, 53, of Elmer, an owner, who estimated that the company sold two million roots last year.

Though outlets that sell asparagus fresh out of the ground, like Parzanese Brothers and Terhune Orchards, are few, New Jersey growers are plentiful. According to the State Department of Agriculture in Trenton, 1,100 acres of asparagus were farmed last year, valued at a little over $5 million. According to a Agriculture Department spokeswoman, New Jersey harvests the fourth-largest number of acres dedicated to asparagus in the nation.

If asparagus scholarship were measured, New Jersey might also be among the nation’s leaders. According to Stephen Garrison, a former director of the Asparagus Breeding Program in the department of plant biology and pathology at Rutgers University, Rutgers is among only a few institutions in the country with a dedicated asparagus-research staff.

Dr. Garrison, 75, of Pittsgrove, has been retired for a decade after more than 25 years of asparagus study. But he still works almost daily as a consultant at Rutgers, where the asparagus program is now run by Chee-Kok Chin.

Lately, Dr. Garrison has been crossing a purple breed from Italy with New Jersey plants for eventual introduction to the market. The purple variety, he said, changes the flavor. “To me,” he said, “it has a slightly sweeter taste.” Otherwise, “the main focus has been on tip quality,” he added. “People like a real tight tip.”

Beyond that and the fatness or thinness of each spear, said Dr. Garrison — who agrees with Mr. Parzanese and Ms. Mount that the girth of spears has little bearing on their tenderness — buyers hardly consider the vegetable’s qualities.

“It’s not like apples or even tomatoes now, where it’s sold by variety names,” he said. “We just don’t have that kind of relationship with the consumer yet.”

It may not be far off, though. Fran Hancock, a salesman and a manager at the 1,500-acre Sheppard Farms in Cedarville, which grows 300 acres of asparagus and sells it to chain stores like Trader Joe’s and ShopRite, as well as farmers’ markets, is beginning to notice some recognition for the state’s product.

“We’re starting to see a demand for Jersey asparagus, sort of like with the tomato,” he said. “People are paying a premium for it.”

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