White and green asparagus in the market.
Asparagus are long-lived vegetable plants that grow from underground crowns and can produce healthy and edible asparagus stalks for up to twenty five years. When first planted, asparagus crowns can take three years to produce their first edible stalks, depending on your variety. Simple watering, feeding and soil maintenance through this establishment period ensures a productive asparagus patch in your garden for years to come. Does this Spark an idea?
Sun and Soil
Asparagus thrive in full sun exposure with at least seven to eight hours of unobstructed sunlight each day. If there is shade on your asparagus patch that prevents those needed hours, do some preventive pruning of overhead trees or competing plants and shrubs.
The soil around the crowns should be nutrient rich and well drained. Surface amend the soil around seedling asparagus plants once or twice a year with compost, well-aged manure or peat moss, and/or mulch with straw. This will boost the soil's nutrient and moisture-holding capacity without disturbing the plants as the amendments break down and percolate into the soil with watering.
Watering and Weeding
Water your young asparagus seedlings regularly and deeply, allowing water to soak the soil. Water deeply whenever the surface inch of the soil dries out. Depending on your climate and time of year, this can mean a watering regimen of every three to 7 days. This can seem like an enormous amount of water for a vegetable you cannot even see yet, but healthy asparagus roots can grow down into the soil to ten feet. Their healthy establishment ensures their long life as plants and vigorous vegetable production.
Each time you water, conduct maintenance hand weeding. If you have mulched with compost and straw, the weeds will already be kept to a minimum, but weekly pulling from the moist soil is easy and keeps weeds under control. If weed growth has built up significantly, use a small, three-tine cultivating fork or small rake to pull the weeds while not disturbing the plants themselves.
Tags: asparagus patch, disturbing plants, into soil, soil around, with compost