Asparagus

About five years ago I picked up The Victory Garden from a used book store.  It is full of great and simple gardening ideas, many of which I have adopted or inspired me to add/change things in my garden.  Growing asparagus was one of those ideas.

I chose to plant the asparagus in front of the screened porch because it is actually out of the way and permitted me to dig the bed fairly deep.  I excavated a trench about 8’ x 16” x 12” (deep).  I lined the sides of the trench using scrap, untreated spruce 2 x 4’s in order to keep the asparagus contained in the bed.  I then mixed the ‘natural’ soil with garden soil, compost and a bit of fertilizer.  I purchased 8 asparagus roots from Lindenberg Seeds in Manitoba who sent them by regular mail with no issues.  Each root set was planted in the bed about 6” deep and 10” apart.  Planting root sets instead of seeds saves about 2 years of plant development.

Each year in late April the asparagus begin to pop up.  As you can see from the photos, the thickness and size of my sprouts differs greatly.

Harvesting is simple.  With a sharp knife I simply cut them at or just below ground level.  I will make sure that I leave 1 or 2 sprouts from each root set and allow them to mature into the large ferns so that the plant can continue to grow.  The ferns can grow 5’ tall….check back in late summer for photos of the ferns.  You have to be careful when harvesting because the sprouts are rather fragile.  In the photo on the right you will notice two thick but very short sprouts….I accidentally broke these off while cutting the others.  We get about ½ dozen bunches like this each season.

We simply rinse them, brush with olive oil, season with salt and pepper (sometimes oregano), and throw them on the barbeque for about 10 minutes.  If you think that the thick shoots would be tough and woody … you would be wrong.  Cooking them like this even makes the thick ones tender.  As far as taste goes, I have not eaten store-bought asparagus with as much taste as these….yum.