How to Grow Your own Asparagus; It's the First "Fruit" of Spring

We did our first picking of asparagus yesterday afternoon. It is nice getting a fresh vegetable before the middle of April up on our mountain in Pennsylvania. It's been a bit cold lately, our local weather forecaster Punxsutawney Phil the Groundhog was right when he said we were getting six more weeks of winter back on Groundhog Day not too far from here in February. However, spring has finally arrived and so has the asparagus. The rhubarb is up too, but it is not quite big enough to start harvesting yet.

Asparagus is becoming my favorite vegetable. You don't have to replant it. It isn't that difficult to weed, because it is coming up before most of the weeds, and a big plus around our area is that the Whitetail deer do not bother it much. They occasionally will step on it, but I have never seen them eating it. Also, I have never had it mowed down like the deer will do to practically everything else if you don't fence it around here.

An asparagus patch or row whichever you prefer to call it is a nice spring project to undertake. And the seed and tree catalog nurseries that I purchase items from are usually going to put some on sale soon.

The first thing in planting your asparagus is to pick a nice sunny spot. It will do okay if it gets a couple of hours of shade a day, but not much more. I have some that I planted near some old jack pines, which I eventually removed, and it did well with a little shade from them, but they were pretty old and sparse and for the time they were shading the asparagus, it was more like filtered sunlight. So I would stick to a full sun area if it is available.

You want to pick an area with some nice deep topsoil if possible. Don't worry if you don't have this option; the asparagus will do well in any soil except heavy clay, and even if you have clay it will work if you fix up the bed properly. The further away from good topsoil either in the clay or sandy direction, the more important it is to dig a bit deeper and create your "own soil" for your asparagus planting. What to mix in to fix up your soil is covered next.

Once you have your spot you are going to dig a trench where you want your asparagus row. If you have great soil, then just dig it about a foot wide and six inches deep for however long you want it. If you start to hit some clay then dig it down about a foot or so and add some rotted cow manure or some good topsoil to the bottom of the trench.

You can also use finished compost, and you can mix a bit of peat moss in with the manure or other materials if you want to. I would not use a whole lot of peat moss though. Add whatever gets you up to the six inch trench needed. This is all you need to do for site preparation. You also want to have enough topsoil ready to fill in the trench once you have placed your asparagus crowns.

If digging a trench sounds like too much work you can also plant it using my "shovel hole" method. Which is explained in my YouTube video. I honestly have given up the trench method for this one. It is a lot easier and I get good results from it. However, if your soil isn't that great and you want to really fix it up before planting, I would use the trench method. Whatever way you choose to plant it, this post gives information that applies to both methods of planting. And you can use my easy maintenance method with either trench or shovel hole planted rows or plots.

The asparagus roots are often just called crowns. This is because they have a crown like top and the roots come down from the crown kind of like hair. To me though they kind of look like teacup size spiders with the roots coming down like legs. The teacup size may be a bit big, as they are going to vary in size, but they will be close to the size of a teacup.

The next step is planting the asparagus crowns. Place them in the trench with the crown up and the roots spread out around the crown and facing downward toward the bottom of the trench. You can space them as far a eighteen inches apart, but I usually put them about a foot apart. That way you get a more continuous row in a shorter amount of time. Once you have the crowns placed, just fill in the trench with your leftover topsoil. I would do this by hand around the roots/crowns until I have them covered nicely, and then I would gently shovel in the rest of the soil into the trench.

Now come the delayed gratification part. They will grow and look and be eatable the year you plant them, but don't cut them and eat them the first year. Just let them grow and keep them weeded. The will get to be huge airy fern-like plants, some with red berries. Mine get as high as four feet tall when I stop cutting them and let them grow out at the end of the harvest time. The first year they probably won't get that big, but they'll at least get to be a foot or two.

Now depending upon the variety you plant, you may or may not be able to pick some for about two weeks beginning the next year after planting. Make sure you look into this when you are selecting your variety and your supplier, because you are going to want to eat some of these next year - no doubt. With older varieties you may not be able to pick till the second year after planting. The year after your first picking, as described above, you can pick for about four weeks. Then the third spring after planting you can pick as much as you want, but I do not pick them for much more six or or eight weeks.

When I say pick, I really mean cut. To harvest your asparagus use a sharp paring knife to cut the spears a little bit below soil level. I sometimes cut them right at soil level, either way no digging is involved, just cut them close to the ground.

All of the asparagus that we have planted and eaten to this point is the tried and true Mary Washington variety. We like its flavor and size, and it has been a very reliable producer. Last year I planted some Jersey Giant and Purple Passion varieties. They both did well on their first season, and both are coming up now, so I am thinking that they will be good for the future, but I can't say so for sure yet.

After the picking period, you want to then let your asparagus grow out for the rest of the summer so that it can nourish and build up the roots to survive the winter and provide you with more good eating the following spring. What is nice with asparagus is that it gives you something really early from the garden, and when it is time to quit picking asparagus you have other vegetables and fruits ready to replace it.

At the end of fall, or the beginning of winter when your asparagus has become dried out and a light brown or golden color cut them back just a bit above ground level. You can use bypass loppers to cut each stalk near ground level, or you can just set the mower level at about 3 or 4 inches above the ground and mow them. You can just straddle the trench with your riding mover and mow them down. This is usually how I do it. I make sure that my blades are fairly sharp, and I also make sure that I don't mash the asparagus with my tires. If your row is rounded up or is not quite level, err on the side of mowing it bit higher, so you don't break up the clumps of asparagus too much.

About a week or two after I cut the stalks for winter, I begin fertilizing the rows. You should fertilize your plants for better yields. I use cow manure to fertilize my asparagus. I do not put it right on top the the stems. I put it all around them and along the edges of the rows. I put it about 6 inches deep. You do not need to use as much, but I have it available from my cows so I use it. Another thing that I do is I put wood ashes down the whole row, on top of everything about two or three times during the winter from our wood burner. Only use wood ashes, no other kinds of ashes, like coal or paper or whatever.

You do not have to have ashes or manure. I have them so I use them. You can use compost, or you can just buy fertilizer. If you buy fertilizer just use 10-10-10 and make sure it is approved for vegetable gardens. You can use fertilizers of other numbers, just double check to make sure they are okay for asparagus. If you can use organic fertilizer that is probably better. If you do use commercial fertilizers, organic or non organic, try to mix in some other organic matter if possible, but the commercial fertilizer will work too.

I have found that it is very hard to keep the asparagus from coming up, even when you don't have the time or energy to plant it properly it tends to make it anyway. I had ordered too many plants one spring and was just tired out and did not feel like planting the asparagus that I had left to plant. I felt like if I had to dig another trench they would be throwing me in it instead of the asparagus crowns. I just dug shovel size holes, choppped up the soil in the hole with the shovel, pulled out enough dirt with my hands to put a crown down in there, and covered it up. I then repeated this every one foot till I was out of crowns. This row turned out fine. We have been eating it for years now.

I think I have just talked myself into planting some more. I am going to check out the Stark Brothers website to see if they have any on sale yet. They generally have good products, and that is who we got the new varieties from last year. Our Mary Washington was bought from Miller Nurseries, years ago before they were bought out by Stark. I hope this post gets you thinking and perhaps doing and then eating some of your own asparagus.

Jim