Sprigs of Asparagus

 

Does anyone remember that song "Age of Aquarius" by 5th Dimension? Anyway, that was what was in my head when I came up with the title of this post. I thought it likely a bit obtuse for anyone to catch it.

To recap the above photo, I ordered 24 asparagus plants from a seed company on the west coast and despite me stating where I lived and what zone, they never arrived when it was prime planting time. Only after complaining did they finally sent them and thus they went into the ground a couple months later after they are normally done producing for the year. I tilled the soil and added some better soil but admit that they didn't get planted in optimum conditions at the optimum time.  That was two years ago.

You are supposed to wait two years before picking your first asparagus to give them time to get established so we didn't pick any last year. We did have some sprigs come up last year but it definitely wasn't from all 24 plants. I'm guessing maybe only 10 or so plants survived that first winter.

This spring, we had maybe 8 show any signs of life and so I decided that just wasn't going to do it for us and so when one of my local stores put out their asparagus crowns, we picked up a bundle of maybe 14 or so crowns and brought them home. I put them wrapped in plastic in our fridge overnight and the next morning dug around all the few spears that were there and simply removed all that bad soil. I dug down into the clay a bit and removed that as well. I then backfilled with slightly composted manure, something I didn't do the first time around. I then added a couple inches of good soil on top of that and planted the crowns topped by more good soil and some of the better top soil that I initially removed. It was a lot of work.

Now, several weeks later, the fruits of my labors are visible and all of them are sprouting. My plan is to let them continue to grow up and then get a bit more top soil to mound the bed because they like to be well drained and perhaps top dress it with a bit more composted manure. I know from our past garden, composted manure and asparagus do really well together. 

So now the clock starts over and perhaps two years from now, I will at least have an established asparagus bed with plenty of sprigs for consumption.