As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
I think most people like fresh asparagus as it tastes like garden fresh peas. It appearing in other venues like frozen or sitting in the supermarket display, it really is no the same like most vegetables.
This planting guide is from start to finish in the above are a plot of asparagus we started from seed we collected. Mots of my outlawing is not noticed, but in this case the rich Baptist decided to walk her dog and that is the first clue I was caught in a big WOOF.
I was in the ditch or right of way, so she could have chewed my ass, but there was nothing she could do about it, as it was public, and there was a female asparagus plant there with red berries on it.
We had a nice bowl of berries, but my asshole cousin, Hoss, appeared and stole them off the counter. Pissed me off as those were Grandpas asparagus and they have not had seeds since.
So we got a bag of them, they are sticky, and fruit flies like them, but I leave plastic bag open so they dry down to a black brown and that takes months, so when spring arrives, I have dry berries which easily crush out about 2 to 4 seeds per berry.
For my seed flat, I used a blueberry container which was plastic that TL had, with a lid on it. You have seen them and they work good. Put in potting soil and planted about 50 seeds and with the seed sprouter, I about gave up as I think it took almost 2 weeks for them to sprout. That surprised me as another batch sprouted the next week.
I just like all wee baby plants, potted them into these seed plots and watered and as I was busy, you can see they got to leggy without sun. Nice thing about asparagus is they grow tall like this, but you just plant them about 6 inches deep and keep covering them up as they grow, so leggy is not a big deal.
Now asparagus come in male and female. Females are little things, Males are the bigger stalks. These will not be like stuff you get out of a garden seed place with stalks like.......well which are huge. I got some from Schumway or someone 3 years ago, and those things are huge. I had thought the wild male plants we had here were big, but they are small compared to what you can get in these hybrids.
These are free, and each one is unique as a plant. They grow here wild from I suppose someone's garden catalog plants and it is a great game of Asparagus Hunting around here in people are quite territorial of their asparagus patches. It is just easier to put in the time, plant them, tend them for 3 years and then have your own patch.
Actually if they are male patches, you can get by or have too much with just 6 mature plantings. So in having these 18, we are going to have allot of asparagus, If you can't find any wild plants, seeds are still cheap and you will have more plants growing than you care to dig holes or deal with.
Asparagus when established are pretty maintenance free. It helps to keep the grass out, but most of the stuff in the wild grows in the grass. So you just put in the labor early and enjoy the results for your lifetime and if you keep the place in your family for your family's lifetimes.
I use used half gallon plastic jugs to water and some kind of tray under the plants to water them. Makes things easy and have gone to commercial potting soil as a splurge. As I keep my tomatoe and other planting containers, I always have something to recycle through.
They are pretty wiry as young plants and forgiving in not breaking off like tender plants like tomatoes. They put down a pretty long root with even a little green shoot on top. I use a pocket knife to slice the soil and lift the seedlings out.
That is about all I got on this adventure. I will keep on planting these seedlings over the next years. I want to try rhubarb too as that fascinates me in I never tried that before, but for this, this is about the most cost effective way to grow your own asparagus.
Oh the theory is, use a rototiller to till your patch up, move the soil off, and then hit it again and put that trench in that way, so there is little work involved in planting these shoots.
As long as you are in Zone 5, you can probably sprout most of this stuff to the end of summer for transfer. The Brier is not forgiving for wee baby things, so I just have a few months to do this.
Nuff Said
agtG
