Tag Archive : asparagus

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On Asparagus

June 19, 2022 | Gardening | No Comments

asparagus frond

Asparagus is a big favorite in my family. In the beginning, it was just me who really loved it, but the more I tried to keep it all for myself, the more the kids wanted a share. Go figure.

Asparagus is very hardy, and easy to grow here in zone 2/3. We have a substantial amount of the stuff, spread over three different patches. We’re currently harvesting from maybe 35 – 40 plants, and this spring, we were getting around 1.5 to 2 pounds, every second or third day. It still isn’t enough!

Row of asparagus
An asparagus row in my garden.



We did plant 10 more roots last year, and another 10 this year, so hopefully we will have enough for everyone to eat their fill in another few years.

Here are my thoughts on growing asparagus:

Asparagus will survive in not-weeded conditions, but they won’t get to the big, juicy spears you can harvest lots of (or it will take a lot longer for them to get there). We dug one patch out of sod around 8 or 9 years ago, and planted asparagus there, but the arrival of child #2 meant we ran out of time to stay on top of it, and that bed got abandoned. I still see several asparagus plants growing in that spot, but the spears are too small to harvest, even after all that time. They are hanging in there, but barely.

Asparagus spear in wood chip mulch
Wood chip mulch around the base of an asparagus plant – with grass mulch piled nearby.

What we’ve done with our two surviving beds is weed them well, dump on a bunch of compost, then cover the whole thing heavily with wood chips. It hasn’t completely eliminated the weeds, but it vastly reduces the amount of weeding needed. The established asparagus doesn’t seem to mind pushing through the extra several inches of ‘stuff’, and the mulch really helps with water retention during hot, dry spells.

Asparagus also likes significant amounts of water, so we do water them if it’s really dry. We try to water deeply when we do water, as the roots are way down there, and won’t benefit from light surface watering. They will survive drought, but again, you won’t get great production without sufficient water.

Asparagus don’t really spread through roots, but they can self-seed if you have female plants (some of the cultivars that commercial places sell are male-only crowns – great for production, but they won’t set seed). They don’t really self-seed on wood chips, though. One of our patches is at the edge of our garden, and we sometimes find little baby asparagus there; we try to relocate those back into the patch, but the survival rate is not great. I’ve also tried growing asparagus from seed, but haven’t had much luck with that. They sprouted, and grew, but did not survive their first winters on any of the occasions I’ve tried, so now I just order the 2 year old roots from nurseries.

Once a root is healthy and established, they will push out lots of spears, though not necessarily all at once. I have one bed that is healthy, well-tended, watered, and ten years old; from that bed, I am getting initial spears that are bigger around than my two thumbs together. I harvest all of the big spears from those plants, over and over. So I might pick 4 or 5 spears one day, then another 4 or 5 in a few days, and so on, until each spear coming up is smaller than my pinkie finger. I have big hands; my pinkie is bigger in diameter than a pencil, but I like to leave lots for the plant to re-establish with, in case there is drought or other weather issues. At that point, I stop picking and let the asparagus grow up and form ferns.

asparagus frond
An asparagus leafing out – it looks very fern-y!

Most of the articles I’ve seen recommend waiting until year 3 to harvest, and only harvesting spears that are bigger in diameter than a pencil. However, when you are establishing new beds, I actually recommend giving the plants more time to establish, and fewer pickings, than the literature suggests.

The way asparagus works is that it stores up energy and nutrients in its roots, and uses that energy to push up the spears. I find that if you can be patient and go easy on it for the first few years of harvest, then you end up with a stronger, more resilient plant, and to me, long term resilience is more important than large and early harvests.

Asparagus Spear
An asparagus spear – I stop picking them at a much larger diameter than recommended.

I try not to harvest until the plants are 4+ years old (I buy 2 year old roots, than wait at least 2 years to harvest), or at least putting out multiple spears bigger around than my thumb. Like I said earlier, I also stop harvesting well before the recommended minimum size, as I want my plants to have lots ‘in the bank’ to size up the roots with, even if summer growing conditions are less than ideal.

Personally, I think asparagus is a great perennial food plant for northern gardens, and if you have the space and the time, I would encourage you to plant a bunch!

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By Jess

May 2019 Food Storage and Seasonal Food Report

May 4, 2019 | Root Cellar and Food Storage, Seasonal Food | 2 Comments

a stack of spaghetti squash - Rural Dreamsfrom our food storage

Yay! It’s May!

We’re creeping up on one of my favorite parts of the year – planting! We have a couple zillion fruit trees, grape vines, and perennial flowers either on their way or waiting in my seed starting trays, and I can’t wait to get them into the ground.

Meanwhile, on the food storage front, our root cellar veggies are mostly done. We still have potatoes that are firm and not sprouting, but they are bitter, and not tasty. There are a couple of little onions, which will likely still be good for another month, but we have essentially run out, and resorted to buying onions from the store. We also have a couple of maxima squash left (!), which I’m torn between roasting up before they rot and leaving alone to see how long they’ll hold out…either way, we’ll definitely be saving seeds from those ones!

Then there’s the spaghetti squash. That stuff is food storage magic. Still firm and tasty, after sitting on our kitchen counter since we harvested it in September. Now that the other squash is basically done, we’re instituting a roster of spaghetti squash meals – enchalada stuffed squash, spaghetti squash with feta and cream cheese, and squash with meat sauce are going to be in heavy rotation until it’s too hot to use the oven. Yum.

Spaghetti Squash - Food storage magic! - Rural Dreams

I’m expanding the food storage report to also talk about fresh foods that are in season month by month. For us right now, that’s a very limited selection…basically, just eggs, chives, and the early asparagus, for now.

The dandelions aren’t even up yet (we’re zone 2, maybe 3, and it’s still well below freezing at night), but we have a patch of chives and asparagus plants that are planted right up against the foundation of the house. Because the heat from the basement bleeds out into the soil, things planted there come up weeks earlier than anywhere else…meaning we’ve got lovely chive patches just in time for the beginning of the spring egg glut.

A basket of eggs - a seasonal spring food

Did you know that eggs are naturally a seasonal food? In the dark of winter, most hens will hardly lay anything at all, unless you have heat and artificial light in your coop. In December and January, we’re lucky to get a few eggs a day from our 25 (or so) hens – or none at all, if the hens are molting. Once the daylight hours go over 12 or 13 hours a day, though, the chickens kick it into high gear. Even though most of the hens in our flock are at least 2-3 years old, we’re still getting more eggs than we can really eat – we’re getting around a dozen eggs a day right now, and this will increase as it warms up and the days get really long.

The asparagus in the patch by the house was actually up about 5 or 6 inches, and I was eagerly eyeing them up, but it didn’t occur to me to harvest them before we had a couple of nights with -10 Celsius temperatures, so what was up is now a limp, rotting mess. There’s more coming up already, though, so it’ll only be a few days before I have my first taste of asparagus, likely served as a side to scrambled eggs with chives. I can hardly wait!

Asparagus growing out of the ground - seasonal spring food

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By Jess

Four Weeks to Germination, My Left Foot (an update on our experiment of starting asparagus from seed)

April 7, 2019 | Gardening | 1 Comment

asparagus from seed in a seed starting tray

Three weeks ago, I planted a bunch of asparagus seeds. I know it’s waayyyy too early to be starting stuff for my regular garden, but the asparagus seed packets clearly stated that the seeds should be started three months before last frost, in part because the seeds take up to four weeks to germinate.

My asparagus seeds did not take four weeks to germinate.

baby asparagus plants pushing against the lid of a seed starting tray

Neither did the rudbeckia, echanasia, yarrow, or any of the other supposedly slow to germinate things I planted that day. I didn’t do anything special with the seed trays at all. I planted the seeds, watered them, put the covers on, and set them in a south-facing window…then basically forgot all about them, since they weren’t supposed to do much of anything for a long time.

rudbeckia and echanasia plants in a seed starting tray

The asparagus plants are so tall now that they are all crumpled up from pushing on the lid of my seed starting tray, but I don’t have anywhere to put the little plants, because it’s still snowing outside…

an orange wheelbarrow partially covered by snow in a spring snowstorm

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By Jess

Starting Asparagus From Seed

March 13, 2019 | Gardening | 6 Comments

Asparagus seed packets and a tray of dirt.

I get a little frustrated with my access to garden plants, sometimes. There are no fruit tree nurseries in the nearest town, and only a couple of big-box stores that carry garden stuff; the locally-owned place shut down last fall. There are a couple of bedding plant places, but they don’t generally have much (or anything) for perennial plants.

Big box stores are frustrating places to try to buy perennials. Far too often, I see zone 4 or even 5 stuff being sold; a lot of tree and shrub buyers are going to be disappointed the first time their purchases encounter a normal winter.

I am also sick of winter. Seriously sick of winter. The local news pointed out that we had 67 consecutive days that did not come above freezing; more than half of them were -30 or colder. The days are getting longer, but the snow is still at least thigh deep across most of our acreage, and while it is around freezing, it’s not really warm. This is probably a taste of our new normal with climate change. The hype had us all set for growing mangoes on the prairies in my lifetime, but instead it’s looking more like drought and polar vortexes and forest fire smoke. Blech.

Showing snowdrifts in my yard - I am sick of winter!

Clearly, I needed something to get into a better headspace. What better than playing in some dirt?

I ordered a couple of asparagus seed packets over the winter, since there are only three (!) varieties of asparagus that I have come across to order as roots online in Canada. What the heck, Canada? I’m all about the diversity, and have been pretty disappointed about the Mary Washington / Jersey Giant / Sweet Purple asparagus options.

Luckily, Baker Creek had a couple of new options I hadn’t seen before – Connovers Colossal and Precoce D’Argenteuil. Ordering those effectively doubles my asparagus options. I have never tried growing asparagus from seed, though, so it may or may not work out as planned. Some of our asparagus has self-seeded before, as we’ve found tiny little fronds in the garden, but we haven’t tried to do it on purpose, up until now. Stay tuned for updates in a few months.

The seed packets indicated to start the seeds 8-12 weeks prior to last frost, and here we are, 11 (or so) weeks from our anticipated planting date. Perfect timing.

So I got out all of my seed starting supplies (hello, old friends!) and played in the dirt for a bit. Besides the asparagus, I planted a bunch of seeds for perennial flowers that will attract bees and butterflies. Black Eyed Susans, Purple Coneflowers, and some Speedwell – pretty things for the flowerbeds I plan to dig in the front lawn this spring.

Now we just need this snow to go…

A tray of asparagus being started from seed

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By Jess