Don’t be afraid to buy seed and start in little pots. Then plant them after a year. You can always add these to big roots you buy and then your plot will only get better.
Just be sure to Mark the younger ones so you won’t harvest them for 2 years.
I gather my own seeds and start them in my greenhouse. They lose leaves over winter but sprout again in spring. Their roots become very big.
Some Will be female. Either eat them or replace with male for bigger harvest.
I planted millennium asparagus from Stark Bros last year. I used one of those corrugated metal beds (8’x2’x17") since they are so long lived. I used mushroom compost and sand to fill it up. They took about a month to pop through the ground. Planted them about a foot deep. By the end of the year they were huge. I actually had to add support for them.
They’ve been poking up for about 3 weeks now. They are growing extremely fast and most are thicker than my thumb. I harvested just a handful…then the frost took the rest. Now I know to harvest them all if frost is in the forcast. I’m just letting the rest rip for the remainder of the year to feed the roots for next year. Then the real harvest begins!
Has anyone ever had their asparagus crowns rot over winter? I first planted 20 crowns 2 years ago in a raised bed; nice and deep, lots of compost and sun. The bed is in a cool microclimate that doesn’t thaw until about three weeks after the sunnier parts of my yard, and it is a bit narrow - about 2ft wide.
Only one crown ever survived in that bed. They were all big and healthy going into winter and then in the spring when I dug them up to see what had happened, they were all dead and mushy. Can’t tell why that one crown survived, really.
I have bulbs in a different spot of that same bed and those generally come up, so been thinking of trying again and racking my head to figure out what went wrong last time.
Planted purple passion last week for the first time. I planted in trenches per all the extension sites I looked at about how to grow asparagus. They’re in raised beds, but I’m a little concerned now seeing this thread, as below the 17” bed is only about 3” of good soil and then 12” of gravel, rock and this ancient crumbling asphalt as 1/4 of the property had this type of driveway put in 50 years ago. Do you think they’re going to take over the bed if their roots can’t go deeper?
Hmm… the only thing in my area that tunnels really is chipmunks. When I dug up the dead plants they were still there, just kind of… sad looking skins of them lol, and I didn’t see any tunnels when digging, so I’m inclined to think that it wasn’t a pest eating them.
I started ours by seed, transplanted into a kiddie pool early spring. Transplanted into a 4ft x 100ft row that same fall after the went dormant. Let them grow two seasons. We now have delicious heirloom martha washington asparagus out the ying yang.
