Asparagus in December?

 We just started new asparagus beds this year. We haven't harvested any, because everything we've read has said to let the plants develop and the crowns grow before harvesting. In the second year, we can harvest for two weeks, and then for four to six weeks in subsequent years. The bed should last for fifteen years or more.

Now I have a dilemma. Our Purple Passion asparagus is coming up in December! So is that the end of last season, even though I've taken all the dying, yellow vegetation and thrown it in my compost piles this fall, or is it the beginning of the spring harvest, and therefore a good thing to harvest? Or will the frost kill it off so quickly, it won't matter?

I'll post some pictures of winter beds, mulched with leaves from our yard, in case you don't believe me. You'll see the garlic, kale, and mustard that you'd *expect* to see growing this time of year, but you'll see the asparagus as well. I'm also growing Russian Comfrey as a high-protein supplement for our future laying hens. Don is working on our coop every chance he gets.

Purple Passion Asparagus with Russian Comfrey in the Background

Birdbath with ice in it; taken the same day

Garlic and kale

Winter garden bed with kale, mustard, garlic, and sage

More Reasons to Grow Your Own

Some states have greatly tightened the noose on illegal immigration. The result is that crops are left to rot in the fields for a lack of skilled workers:

http://www.takepart.com/article/2012/05/15/farm-labor-shortages

Growers are moving toward more mass-commodity crops that can be harvested mechanically and away from organic, sustainable methods.

Even with the high unemployment rates, Americans are not stepping up to take these jobs:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44981872/ns/us_news-life/#.T7OOEFKqa25

They cannot make decent money at it, they do not have the skills, and they are not physically fit enough to work like a skilled farmhand.

These farmhands have skills because many have been toughened by farm work since they were seven or eight years old.

That's right!

Children have been working in the fields with their parents to provide income for their families. While most of us in the U.S. have children who go to school most of the year, the migrants' children are in the fields, harvesting our produce, making less than minimum wage, and facing pesticide exposure and other dangers we wouldn't THINK of exposing children to. Farm work is one of the most dangerous jobs in the United States. An estimated 400,000 children in the United States face these abuses, and it's perfectly legal due to an outdated law from 1939.

A new documentary, "The Harvest/La Cosecha," is bringing these abuses before the public's eye.

These are yet more reasons to eat locally, seasonally, and to grow as much of our own food as we can. One of the foods left to rot for lack of workers was asparagus. Well, let's grow asparagus in our own back yards and take control over our food supply and the conditions under which we grow it!

Asparagus Rising

I spent late afternoon and early evening today planting vegetable seeds around the asparagus in two of my raised beds. Check out Mother Earth News' garden planner for the layout and for details of what I put where in my square foot gardens.

 I started some seeds indoors in peat pellets over a month ago, but for the first time I've been disappointed with the results. Many seeds never sprouted at all. And many of the seedlings died, even the hardy marigolds, and what is left won't be ready to plant outside for several more weeks.

It was so depressing I had to head outside to spend some quality time with my sage plants to cheer myself up. The sage, transplanted from my former home in North Carolina, is adjusting well and blooming beautifully:

 I'm not sure what went wrong with the peat pellets. In past years I have overwatered, causing fungus to grow on my seedlings. In an effort to avoid that, I may have underwatered my plants this year. Some of the seed may have been too old or gotten a little moist in storage somehow. I just don't know.

 On a more positive note, the asparagus I planted is doing great so far. The spears look so good, I have to remind myself they are off-limits for harvesting the first year. Check them out:

Mary Washington and Jersey Supreme Asparagus

Most of the purple passion is coming up more slowly, but it's coming:

Purple Passion

I have tried sowing some inoculated Dutch white clover around 8 squares of asparagus. I am hoping it will act as a ground cover and living mulch for the asparagus while it improves the soil with its nitrogen-fixing properties. I am torn between the fact that asparagus is a heavy feeder and the fact that it doesn't compete well with weeds. Then again, clover is great for feeding pollinators and attracting beneficials to the garden. So I decided to risk it with 8 squares, keeping the clover confined to the squares. I'll see how the clover-squares do vs. the bare squares and figure it out from there.

Update for May 1: I bought some dill, chives, leeks, and sweet pepper plants at Southern States this week, hardened them off a little, and transplanted them into some of the squares. I prefer to grow my own plants from seed because I worry about diseases unwittingly brought home with plants mass-produced for big box stores. But the few seedlings I have are small and iffy, and I just can' wait. I decided to skip the peas I was going to grow. Summers warm up around here so quickly, and peas are a cool-season plant. I will plant them for the fall or I will plant them late next January now that I have beds and soil in place.

The GOOD news is that most of the plants that seem to be surviving are varieties of tomatoes. They are small but most look like they'll live. HURRAY, tomatoes! I can almost taste them.

The "Little Tomato That Could" got roughed up, somehow, when Don brought it into the house to protect it from last week's cold weather. Sadly, some of its stems were broken. But it's still alive and it's still producing flowers and tomatoes. I spread some Solu-Lime around it and fertilized it with some diluted compost tea. I am already starting to worry about blossom end rot, which in my experience is more common and harder to treat in potted tomatoes. When the weather gets hot and dry, it is hard to maintain the consistent moisture that tomatoes need when they are confined in pots.

The asparagus is looking great, and the "purple passion" is catching up to the other strains in terms of size. We have been eating all the asparagus and strawberries we can handle from our CSA. It is so delicious, we can't wait to eat asparagus from our own back yard. Just two more years!


***Update for 5/23/12: I had to pull up my first "female" asparagus plant today. It was one of the purple passion plants. The standard advice is to pull up any plants that start to produce berries. These are female plants. The reason is that over time, they are less productive than the males, and the berries produce baby asparagus plants. The babies grow all over the place, like weeds, and have to be weeded by hand. If you let them grow, half of the babies are female, compounding the problem. This is one reason why the Jersey hybrids are more productive: they are mostly male. The upside to pulling up the "mama" plant was that there was a smaller spear growing up from the crown, so Don and I had a taste of our own asparagus before I tossed the plant in our compost pile. Purple Passion is definitely sweet and tender! We ate it raw.


***Update or 7/18/12: The asparagus has grown in so thick, it has smothered most of the clover for lack of light. I suspect this is just as well. The clover adds nitrogen to the soil, and if it's dead, it can't compete with the asparagus for water in the summer heat we are having. I was afraid the clover would take over my vegetable beds, but it never did.

Planting Asparagus

Purple Passion

Tonight I am physically tired. My 30 asparagus crowns, long awaited from R.H.Shumway's Seed Company, arrived yesterday, so today I finished amending the soil in our raised beds and planted them. I had ordered them from Shumway's because the price was good. They seemed to arrive in healthy condition; time will tell. I ordered ten crowns each of Jersey Supreme, Mary Washington, and Purple Passion. I ordered Jersey because it's a mostly-male top producer, Mary Washington because I have a soft spot for heritage crops, and Purple Passion because of its reputation for outstanding sweetness and flavor. Plus it's purple until you cook it, and I like color and variety.

As you can see from the picture, the asparagus crowns are cute-ugly in a "Cousin It" from the old "Munsters" t.v.-show kind of way.

Cousin It from "The Munsters"

Shumway's planting directions came wrapped up inside with the crowns. Since I didn't see directions right away, I went look online for directions on how to plant them. Most websites recommended digging a trench and filling it in, either slowly over time or all at once. Asparagusgardener.com had pretty typical directions. But I was using raised beds and a Square Foot Gardening technique, and Don had already measured my beds out into one-foot squares, so I decided not to use trenches and just spread each crown's roots out the best I could in a hole in each square. I hope the asparagus crowns will manage to figure out where their roots go for themselves. Here is a picture of the garden, now surrounded by a fence to keep our dogs out, with the vegetable beds half-filled and the asparagus beds filled in:

The ladder is to climb over the fence. Don put it up in a hurry and still needs to put a gate in it and tighten up the fencing. So I've had to climb up and over the fence using the stepladder all day as I went to work. It was great extra exercise if a little slippery in today's drizzle.

No wonder I'm tired!

The asparagus website said asparagus needs a high PH, around 7.0. I had put compost in the beds and planned to put in even more when I planted the crowns, so without actually measuring the PH of the beds I decided to add some lime. I reasoned that since compost and organic matter lower PH, I should counter the other amendments with something that raises it.

So I amended the top few inches of the beds with some cow manure, some "Nature's Helper" composted manure with forest products, and some Solu-Lime from Southern States. And, yes, I had to haul all this over the fence! I also mixed a little organic bone meal into each hole as I planted the asparagus crowns. This might seem like a lot of work, but the asparagus, once it starts producing in the third year, should keep producing for 15-20 years. It's a heavy feeder, healthy plants in good soil theoretically need less pest control, and we want these beds to get off to a good start.

 If the squirrels don't get it first. My neighbor, Nam, predicts the squirrels in our backyard will wreak havoc on our new garden. This is quite possible. And the way we've fenced it off to keep the dogs out will actually protect the squirrels and encourage the little critters. Don boasts about being a good shot, but he's not a killer at heart, I'm a vegetarian, there are laws against firing guns in the city, and the squirrels will just learn to wait to raid the garden when we're not around . They're smart.

What will we do to squirrel-proof our hard work? I guess that's fodder for other posts when we've had time to figure it out. If you'd like to see what I hope the finished beds will grow, visit Mother Earth News' Garden Planner.

     
**Update on 1/18/14: The squirrels haven't bothered the asparagus. We has some problems with asparagus beetles and asparagus beetle larvae last season. Our answer was to hand-pick as many of the critters as we could and hand-feed them to our chickens. It was time-consuming, but the chickens loved it and are much tamer than they used to be! Last season we picked asparagus for about two weeks, but this season we should be able to pick a lot more. I can hardly wait!