asparagus

Short version:

A well known, long lived, perennial vegetable that tastes far superior to shop bought when home grown. It requires fertile, well draining, water retaining soil in a sunny spot. A great spring vegetable that grows in the hungry gap and once established requires little attention other than weeding. It takes some effort to start an asparagus bed and you’ll need to be patient enough to wait 3 years for the first harvest.

Asparagus (asparagus officinalis) is the first perennial vegetable that I grew. 2 plants have been with us for 13 years and through 2 house moves. I think the variety was Gijnlim, bought as crowns from the pound shop. They started off in the first home in the ground, in a garden that was about 3x4m. When we moved to a new place that had a paved garden about the same size, I dug up the asparagus and took it with us. It lived for 5 years in a very large pot, coincidentally in Battersea near the Asparagus pub, so named because the area was famously known for growing asparagus.

They’re now in a raised bed and new asparagus plants have joined them (varieties: Connovers Colossal, Jersey Knight and Crimson Pacific).

One of the original plants is in the top right. The other short plants about 4 months after they’ve been planted.

How to grow

Before you grow asparagus, you need to understand a little about them. They are perennial plants that love fertile, well draining, moisture retaining soil i.e. with lots of good compost in it.

When you start with a seed, for the first couple of years, the stems are very thin and unrecognisable as asparagus. They reach their feathery frond state (in the picture above) at about a foot tall. These leafy green tops need to be left for the first few years to photosynthesize and provide sugars for the plant. Asparagus should ideally not be harvested till the plant is 3 years old. When the plant is established, in early spring they send up the spears that you recognise from the shops. They grow upwards in their closed bud state and then begin to branch out. The stem gets tougher as thin green branches covered in thin feathery foliage appear off the main stem. With established plants, once the spears being produced become thinner than a pencil you should leave them to grow and feed the roots.

Males plants are reported to be more productive and less prone to disease. The female will produce little poisonous scarlet berries the size of a petite pois. You could save seed and propagate new plants. This is free, but as you can see from the info above, requires much patience.

I never got round to voicing over this… but…You can see the stems are mostly thinner than a pencil (there’s a couple at the back that I left too late to harvest). There’s a little spear still trying to grow. You can see the feathery fronds, the tiny flowers and a unripe (poisonous) berry.

Organic matter

However you choose to grow asparagus you should prepare the ground they grow in by one of the following:

In spring, when planting, dig a 20cm deep trench and incorporate 5-10cm of well rotted manure into the base of this trench and then fill it with 5-10cm of the original soil. How much you fill the trench will depend on whether you’re planting plants or crowns.
In winter for the environmentally friendly, recycling, cheaper route you can also dig 30cm trench and fill this with lots of green kitchen waste and brown waste like shredded cardboard. If you mix it in well with the soil around it, it will breakdown in a few months (hole composting) ready to receive the asparagus plants in spring.

Growing from seed

This is the very cheapest way to get asparagus. Sow single seeds in pots (or toilet tube rolls) indoors about 2cm deep in late winter. These can be transplanted into the garden late spring (biodegradable pots, like loo rolls, makes this more gentle on the fragile roots). The seeds can also be sown direct mid-late spring when the weather warms up. The picture shows three little seedlings pulled out so you can see the size of the seed and the roots (don’t do this with your seedlings).

Growing from plants

You can buy little plants from specialist nurseries online. These are seedlings that are a few months old. These are cheaper than crowns but will take longer to establish.

Growing from crowns

Crowns are the roots from a year old plant. If you are adding the well composted manure in the spring then you make a mound in the trench after you’ve added your 5-10cm of soil back. If you went the composting kitchen waste route the dig a hole about 15cm deep and then make a mound in the middle. Spread the roots of the crown over the mount like hair on a head, with the growing shoot buds facing up. Cover with soil leaving the bud tips just about visible. Water in to remove any air spaces in the soil.

Plants should be around 30cm – 40cm apart.

In late autumn when the leafy fronds have turned yellow you should chop down any of the above ground growth. I either put these in the compost bin or sometimes chop them into smaller pieces and spread it over the ground as a mulch and to try and deter the neighbours’ cats from pooing on my soil. At this point you could also mulch with some well rotted manure.

You could also add some blood, fish and bone, or other general purpose fertiliser in early spring before growth starts. It’s worth nothing that organic fertilisers are less prone to run off and therefore less likely to cause eutrophication.

How to Harvest

You will need to wait till the plant is around 3 years old (2 years if started from crowns) before you can start harvesting. Once you get shoots that are thicker than a pencil you can harvest by cutting the spear at the base with a knife. In this third year you should only take a couple of shoots. Leave any shoots that are thinner than a pencil. Through the season the plant will generally produce spears that are thinner and thinner. Once plants are established, spears can appear as early as the last week of March and last for about 2 months before you need to leave the rest of the spears to turn into the feathery fronds that can then photosynthesise and feed the roots. This makes it a welcome vegetable in the hungry gap.

Little one likes them sprayed with olive oil and roasted.

How they taste

Once you eat fresh, home grown asparagus, the stuff you get in the shops seems absolutely pants in comparison. I guess it’s hard to describe the taste of asparagus as it tastes… well… like asparagus. However, if you’ve tasted shop bought asparagus and hated it, don’t pass judgement till you’ve tried it very fresh.

It tastes lovely and ‘clean’ blanched or steamed. If you sauté it or roast it, it develops a complex nutty flavour.

Purple asparagus is reportedly sweeter. We ate 2 spears of our Crimson Pacific last year and it was lovely, but I think we need another year with a bigger crop (and maybe to try a few more varieties) to really be able to compare.

Problems

Slugs and snails can eat through the base of a spear, felling the entire thing. If you notice early enough you can still salvage the spear. Sometimes they nibble the tips causing the asparagus to curl. I haven’t done research on this, but I suspect this is because there are hormones all round the tips of growing shoots causing growth all around the tip at the same rate. When there are less hormones on one side there becomes uneven growth so one side grows faster than the other.

I suspect the biggest problem is actually me. Asparagus does not do well with competition so their bed should be weeded carefully by hand to avoid damaging the fragile roots. Impatience and lack of space in the small garden means that I am incapable of leaving the asparagus bed alone and I keep planting other edibles in and around them. They then compete for nutrients and then grow taller than the asparagus and shade it. Unfortunately I find it impossible to stop myself.

Short version: When the cost is a pound, it is cheap and easy to try out new edibles or flowers. The seeds are about the same as seeds bought elsewhere. The plants are small and require patience but there is a huge variety available:

Raspberry, blueberry, gooseberry, blackcurrant, blackberry bare root plants
Vegetable, herb and flower multipack seeds (usually with 3-6 varieties per pack)
Asparagus crowns
Onion, garlic and shallot sets
Flower bulbs
Bare root cuttings of flowers like climbing roses, oleanders and buddleia

I occasionally find myself unable to walk past pound shops without popping in to see what they have. This time of year, it is simply irresistible. They often have fun plants and seeds. Due to the price, I expect the plants to die and the seeds to fail, but I have often been pleasantly surprised. If you have plenty of patience and very little budget, then it’s a great way to populate a garden. The small price tag feels like a small risk. Usually whenever I buy a plant for my edible garden, I spend forever checking the variety for taste, disease resistance and growing conditions. I carefully plan what is going to happen. This goes out of the window in the pound shop. I do at least google the variety on my phone to check that they’re a variety worth growing. As long as you steel yourself for some disappointment and are willing to invest some time in exchange to keep the budget small you’ll be happy. These are the gems that I’ve found in the pound shop:

The Gijnlim 9 years later with the first stalks of the season

Asparagus

I found asparagus crowns (year old roots) in a pound shop in Balham (which is no longer there) in 2010. I think the variety is/was Gijnlim. Before then I had never grown asparagus. I followed the instructions to plant and leave for a year and in the second year we were rewarded with a couple of stalks of the tastiest asparagus I’d ever eaten. Shop bought asparagus cannot compare to home grown, as the flavour deteriorates quickly after harvesting. I suspect that had I not come across these in the pound shop I still wouldn’t have experienced growing asparagus. You can’t harvest for a couple of years and even then, you won’t get huge harvests for a couple of years more. So, I think I would have been too impatient to consider asparagus if it wasn’t for this impulse buy. I grew them in a very large pot and then it then moved home with us… twice. Now I’ve sworn never to move again those asparagus plants are happily in raised beds. They’ve been joined by a few more carefully chosen plants. The only problem with the crowns from the pound shop is that they turned out to be female plants. I’ve read that female plants are less productive because they waste energy that should go towards growing yummy shoots into reproduction. I guess I could always pick the asparagus berries and try starting new plants.

Peas and Beans

At the same time (in 2010), I also bought a packet of seeds containing 2 varieties of peas and one variety of runner beans. Basically, it cost around 33p per variety. The runner beans turned out to be amazing. I had never come across runner beans in my childhood. No one I knew grew them and I had never eaten them in any situation. I was amazed by the huge purple seeds with black spots. I was surprised how well it did in part shade. This is where my love of vertical growing began. To be able to get such large volume of food over a long period of time in such a small footprint makes this one a winner.

The peas were OK, but we mostly ate them as pea shoots in stir fries. Again, loved the height of these. Now I always plant something climbing behind shorter veggies.

Example of one of the selections. 6 packets of seeds for £1!

Vegetable seed multipacks

For anyone who is new to edible gardening, multipack seeds like these from the pound shop are a nice budget way to try a few things. I used seeds from a pound shop multipack to try beetroot, oregano, basil, aubergines, lettuce and radishes (which I now grow for the yummy greens). There have been other things like herb multipacks. One pack I bought and grew in (I think, as it was a long time ago) 2010 was some sort of Italian selection that included aubergines, tomatoes, oregano and basil. The oregano packet I finished off in 2017 when I was filling our current garden. It has happily self-seeded since. Almost all the seeds have grown successfully.

Blackcurrant plant

This was bought in 2011 as a tiny little thing, about 6 inches of wooden stalk that had some new shoots on it. It took a couple of years to take off, but only made it through one house move. Probably because I tried really hard to neglect it to death. It still took about 2 years to kill it. I realised that I didn’t like blackcurrants. I thought they tasted chicken-y – in a really yucky way. The leaves smelt nice though. I have since learnt that you can’t eat blackcurrants straight off the bush. A year too late I discovered soaking blackcurrants in vodka. A jam jar (yay for repurposing) with a cup of blackcurrants, 3 tablespoons of sugar and topped up with vodka and left for 3 months gives an amazingly, syrupy liqueur with tasty blackcurrants that make great dessert toppers (not for the 4 year old though). I bought a replacement plant this week and I hope to be making merry on them again soon.

Raspberry plant

In 2011, with the blackcurrant I bought a raspberry. It didn’t survive. On a whim in 2018 I tried again with a pound shop malling jewel. I looked it up and it’s a sweet variety. Avoid anything that says tart or acidic in the description, unless you’re fond of sour. Often raspberry descriptions that don’t specifically say sweet -will not be sweet. Full of flavour does not equate sweet. It’s a marketing ploy. It was of course a tiddly little stick, like the blackcurrant and didn’t amount to much in the first year. In 2019 though there were maybe 10 raspberries on it. Hopefully 2020 will be its year to flourish.

Blueberry and Gooseberry

This year 2020 I have bought 2 blueberries “Patriot” and gooseberry “Hinnonmäki grön”. This may be foolhardy. I already have 3 very productive, carefully chosen blueberry plants and a gooseberry that I bought last year that hasn’t produced any fruit yet. It’s just so hard to resist a potential fruit bush that costs a pound. I did at least check before I bought them that they were likely to be tasty. I figure they’re so tiny and can be put into a pot and dumped somewhere for the next 3 years before they get really productive (or die) then I can try and find a space to squeeze them into. Alternatively, I can continue reclaiming bits of the lawn over the years until the husband concedes defeat.

Flower seeds

I don’t really grow flowers, unless I can eat them but 6 different varieties for a pound is hard to resist. I bought some last year, 2019, though the flowers weren’t all the same as the one in the photo. This is a pack from this year. I didn’t sow all the flowers in the end as things like foxglove are toxic. My little one is good at recognising the edibles, but I don’t think it is worth the risk. I ended up scattering the non-toxic ones in a pot last year and then forgot to water them. I wasn’t too sad as it was only a pound.

Flower bulbs

There are a large variety of flower bulbs. However, only the dahlia interested me. I have read that the flowers and tubers are edible. I figured that this was a cheap way to see how difficult it was to grow them and then see if I could figure out if the ones available were tasty. Apparently, they were considered as staples by the Aztecs, but due to the breeding of dahlias for display purposes over the year there is now a wide variety of looks and taste. I will need to do further research and maybe some tentative testing but supposedly all dahlias are edible, but not all taste good.

There are other things available like onion, garlic and shallot sets and bare root flower plants, which I haven’t tried. I guess if I followed my own advice, it wouldn’t be much of a risk to give these a go, but I’d rather have the space in the garden to grow my more perennial or self-seeding edibles. If I had an endless garden, I would probably fill it with pound shop plants…. Well, a girl can dream.

Tag: asparagus

Grow things from the pound shop