Asparagus Ho!

…I said to Bruce when I got the notice from UPS that our 100 dry-root asparagus crowns had shipped.

“What’s an asparagus ho?” said Bruce with interest, completely taking my comment out of context. Maybe he was referencing an asparagus hoe, but by the time we got back on track we knew we had a big job ahead of us.

We had decided to put in an asparagus patch on a whim, ordered the crowns, and then researched what needed to be done to plant them.

A lot. We started by plowing up a 15×20 foot plot on the top of a hill. Asparagus doesn’t like its feet wet, so after debating locations, we decided to try the hill.

This is fescue grass, which in my limited farmer opinion is a curse from hell. It is very difficult to kill. It was too late to spray it, and we were interested in trying to have an organic asparagus patch, so we just plowed it under. All the literature on asparagus makes it very clear that the patch needs to be grass and weed free. We went over the patch with a rototiller to try to break up the sod. For good measure we bought a truckload of chicken litter and rototilled that as deep into the bed as the rented tiller would go. Bruce left a load of the chicken litter in the tractor bucket and parked it in the shed one night and when I walked in the next morning I thought the entire family of groundhogs that lived under the shed must have died. I wasn’t exactly unhappy, except for the smell!

Then we went back to the internet to find out exactly how to prepare our bed for the asparagus babies that would arrive in a few short days. Not all sources agreed, but the general consensus was it wanted a trench about a foot deep, filled with four inches of compost. We foud a source of compost we could get by the truckload and paid a visit to Riverside Plants and Mulch in Dayton. A rich, beautiful black product, and it didn’t smell like dead chickens!

Now to dig the trenches. Unfortunately the plow and rototillar only dug up the first 8 inches or so, so we had to deepen the trenches. That involved getting through the layer of fescue grass that was very slowly decomposing against the bottom of the bed. And underneath that, solid clay.

Did we really have to dig up that clay? Remember we learned that asparagus don’t like standing water, and we were worried the soil wouldn’t drain well enough. We even did an experiment where we dumped a five gallon bucket of water in a hole to see how long it took to disappear.

This was after about half an hour. So five gallons of water takes 40 minutes (or was it an hour?) to completely drain from a hole that was about 1×2 feet. Does that mean the soil doesn’t drain well, and the asparagus will rot? We have no idea! We just thought it was a cool experiment to do. We figured we better break up the clay anyway, just in case.

Most of the photos for this blog are of Bruce since I’m usually the one taking pictures, but rest assured, we took turns on this one. Also, we took plenty of breaks.

Once we lined the trenches with compost, they looked right pretty.

It was Asparagus Arrivel Day. I was trying to envision how many boxes would show up. How big were 100 one-year-old asparagus crowns? I told our son Andrew to watch for a big package from Stark Bros Nursery and call us as soon as they arrived.

Turns out it was a package no bigger than a shoe box. The little guys looked like tiny squids, and were covered in some kind of white preservative powder. We were supposed to soak the roots for 30 minutes in “compost tea” and then set them sprawled out in the compost.

I did this diligently for about half an hour, measuring exactly two feet and setting up the little mop heads with the strings all evenly distributed, and covering them by hand. Then I just started droppin them in the trench any old way, and shoveling dirt over them like burying a dead chicken.

It hasn’t rained in weeks, so we watered before and after, and finished it all out with a thick layer of straw mulch.

Now all we need to do is wait. In two years, if we don’t kill them and if the fescue doesn’t grow back, we’ll have asparagus!