Seeking Tips for Growing Asparagus, Please.

Cafe Society
1

After a couple failed years of growing asparagus, I built the** Mother of All Raised Planting Boxes **and filled it with yummy, proven barnyard soil. (Also in this box is Zuchinni, where I got a 100% sprouting! A whole bunch of beets in there, too, but nothing shooting up yet.)

I planted them in late March and out of 20 plants, I’ve got action out of 15 so far. These were 2-yr old nursery stock.

I’ve got tiny skinny shoots coming up, some are nearly a foot tall as of today. Some are flowering.

Shoud I cut these back? My goal is to get thicker, fatter shoots later on this summer.

I’ve never grown asparagus before, so don’t really know what I’m doing.

Thanks for any input!

2

I thought it took three years from planting an asparagus bed to being able to harvest asparagus. I hope not, for your sake.

StG

3

I planted 2-year crowns last year and didn’t harvest any. I think you’re supposed to wait a year.

This year, I harvested the fat spears and I’m leaving the later-erupting skinnier spears intact to become this year’s foliage. My understanding (which may be wrong) is that the fat spears come up first, and then if you harvest them the roots send up more spears (probably smaller, since the roots have less available energy), so I wouldn’t expect that you would be getting any fat spears in summer, but I don’t know.

4

PS
I’ve also heard that you shouldn’t harvest spears more than 2 weeks after your last frost date. Here in Virginia (zone 5 in my town), that means no harvesting after May.

5

We stop harvesting in mid-June.

We planted 2-year stock and still didn’t get a good crop until the third year – the third year in the ground.

We’ve learned to check the bed every day. Those things come up fast. :smiley:

And keep it weeded, or you won’t see the nice shoots until they’re tall and woody.

6

I’m probably wrong, but the catalog I ordered them from said that with the 2-year stock you would get a yeild in this, the 3rd year. I’ll have to find that…

Yeah, they do come up fast! Monday, nothing. Tuesday afternoon you got a thing waggin’ in the breeze!

They are too small to eat, but should I be cutting them to promote thicker growth?

7

We cut them, but I can’t say if that helped promote thicker growth. Our neighbors told us to let them go to seed.

8

See my thread in GQ. Obviously I’m a newbie, but learning a lot here. I love the fact that I have a few tall, skinny spears coming up in a crack in my driveway.

9

I go with the rule that you only harvest for a month, then let the rest grow to gather energy for the next year. I’m only halfway through my season, and I’m sick of them already. Sigh. How did this happen? I do like to eat them raw, but … eh. Stalks do not get thicker later in the summer. Some are thicker than others.

Can I blanch and freeze them? I should look that up.

10

I planted mine, let them go a year, and then in the 2nd year, was pretty conservative with the harvesting.

This year, in the 3rd year, I could harvest a whole lot- like every 4 days or so for part of March and April.

Now I’m just letting them grow and do their thing until next year.

11

Can’t help with the asparagus but I just wanted to add that I planted a fig tree this Spring. From a cutting of a friend’s tree (whom we lost two years ago, RIP). The tree is growing…it’s about 18" high with a few big leaves and more leaves coming soon. (The damn neighborhood groundhog ate the first few leaves so I fenced it off with chicken wire and stakes.)

Hopefully by next year or the year after I will have home grown figs.

12

when the plants get established then the new sprouts will come up thick eating size, they will break the ground full diameter. those you harvest, cut at ground level…

let the plants get established.

when they get big enough to harvest then stop doing so in maybe mid-May depends on where you are.

13

The stuff sure is hardy. Last spring a helpful neighbor tilled ours under (accidentally), and we still had a good crop. This spring we tilled it under, planning to get new plants and put them in a new location. The stuff we tilled under is coming up. Guess we’ll leave it where it’s at. :slight_smile:

Before we had the bed, we got our asparagus out of ditches next to farm fields. It couldn’t have been planted there on purpose. And it had no care, except for us cutting it.