PERHAPS THE BEST way to enjoy spring asparagus is to find patches of it growing wild. Birds eat asparagus seeds and deposit them along field edges and stream banks and in wild places that get at least five hours a day of sunlight, so these are all good places to look. A good guide to turn to for this is Euell Gibbons’s book from the 1960s, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, a book about foraging wild food. I went foraging one fine spring day in 1970 in rural eastern Pennsylvania and came back to my friend’s house with a bag full of wild asparagus and morel mushrooms (which can often be found growing near wild asparagus). If you forage for wild asparagus, be careful not to gather it near waste disposal sites, as asparagus has been shown to take up heavy metals from the soil.