“Yes, but then we’d have it. And a plantation’s good for ten years, once it’s started.”
“Plantation! What is that? An asparagus plantation? Asparagus I’ve always heard of in beds.”
“That’s the old idea. I’ve been reading up on it. The new way is to plant asparagus in rows, the way you would rhubarb or corn. Plant six feet apart, and four acres anyway.”
He was not even sufficiently interested to be amused. “Yeh, four acres where? In the clay land, maybe.” He did laugh then, if the short bitter sound he made could be construed as indicating mirth. “Out of a book.”
“In the clay land,” Selina urged, crisply. “And out of a book. Every farmer in High Prairie raises cabbage, turnips, carrots, beets, beans, onions, and they’re better quality than ours. That west sixteen isn’t bringing you anything, so what difference does it make if I am wrong! Let me put my own money into it, I’ve thought it all out, Pervus. Please. We’ll under-drain the clay soil. Just five or six acres, to start. We’ll manure it heavily—as much as we can afford—and then for two years we’ll plant potatoes there. We’ll put in our asparagus plants the third spring—one-year-old seedlings. I’ll promise to keep it weeded—Dirk and I. He’ll be a big boy by that time.”
“How much manure?”
“Oh, twenty to forty tons to the acre——”
He shook his head in slow Dutch opposition.
“—but if you’ll let me use humus I won’t need that much. Let me try it, Pervus. Let me try.”
In the end she had her way, partly because Pervus was too occupied with his own endless work to oppose her; and partly because he was, in his undemonstrative way, still in love with his vivacious, nimble-witted, high-spirited wife, though to her frantic goadings and proddings he was as phlegmatically oblivious as an elephant to a pin prick. Year in, year out, he maintained his slow-plodding gait, content to do as his father had done before him; content to let the rest of High Prairie pass him on the road. He rarely showed temper. Selina often wished he would. Sometimes, in a sort of hysteria of hopelessness, she would rush at him, ruffle up his thick coarse hair, now beginning to be threaded with gray; shake his great impassive shoulders.