How to Grow Asparagus

This web page is a brief summary of how to grow asparagus so that you can achieve the highest yields from your plants.

Growing asparagus is not necessarily the most straight-forward task, and you need patience. It takes 3 years to establish an asparagus plant for food production, but they are perennials, so with some minor attention to certain details, once established, your plants will go on producing food for 20 years plus.

Although asparagus is not necessarily a good plant to grow if you are limited by space, it is well worth considering if you have an area large enough where they can grow undisturbed.

As I said earlier, this page is just a brief summary on how to grow asparagus in order to get the best out of your crop. There is also a more comprehensive page with diagrams which discusses growing asparagus in greater detail. That Page can be found here.

 

How to grow asparagus to get the very best out of your plants…

  1. Use a raised bed. wherever possible with rich well-drained, manured and composted soil. This will be your only opportunity to get the soil right before you plant.
  2. Grow from good quality asparagus crowns purchased from a reputable nursery.
  3. Soak your crowns in a bucket of water for 20 minutes before planting them.
  4. Dig a trench or a hole about 6 inches deep and leave a mound of soil 4 inches deep at the bottom.
  5. Straddle the roots of the asparagus crown over the soil mound, and then cover the roots with a few inches of soil so that the shoots are sticking up through the soil.
  6. As the new shoots grow, add more soil, leaving them just proud of the soil each time until the hole or trench has been fully back-filled.
  7. Keep the soil damp, but not wet, throughout the dry seasons.
  8. Do not pick the asparagus spears in the first year.
  9. Prune the spears back down to short stumps during the second year in the autumn. This will help significantly with the production of abundant edible asparagus spears from year three onwards.
  10. In year 3, the plant will start producing food fast! You could get several inches of growth per day, so harvest often. Cut the spears off a few inches beneath the soil.
  11. Allow the plants some recuperation time before the following growing season. Stop harvesting at midsummer.

As mentioned before, this is just a brief summary note of the key-points of the best ways to grow Asparagus successfully.

For a further and more comprehensive article on growing Asparagus successfully i have written a fuller page which can be seen by clicking the following link: here.