Fall Asparagus

Pretty in the morning with all the dew, isn't it? Lily thought so, too and got this pic for me.

Four weeks ago, I cut all the asparagus trees down for the season.   

Ha!  They took right off again.  Now they are almost as big as before - blooming as well as ever, too, which makes the bees happy.

I am trying to keep these as strong and healthy as possible for spring harvest, so I have resisted going out there every day to pick the one or two new stalks.   We're enjoying the view, though.

Asparagus Fruit

These are the tiny fruit of the asparagus plant.

So cute.

Bees on Asparagus Flowers

Once the asparagus got tall, it started to bloom and once it started to bloom, it started to buzz. 

There are always a few bees in the asparagus forest.   They have to work hard to get this pollen.

The pollen is dark orange and they never have much of it in the pollen baskets on their legs.

Must be good stuff though because there are always a few bees in there.

Asparagus, Year 2

Our asparagus bed is doing pretty well.   I mulched it deeply with leaves in the fall and everything came up!   Yay.  

The big question was this:   How much can we eat without stressing the plants?    The short answer is you can harvest one week for every year old your plants are for years 2-4.

Our plants are 2 years old, so we could harvest for two weeks.   We harvested for one week, then had a hard frost, which froze things to the ground.  I decided to let things go after that.

A hard frost will knock the asparagus back to the ground.   Next year, I will harvest every spear before those nights, no matter how much we've cut already.   We might as well eat it as let it die back to the ground.    

The plants shot up during that hot week we had early in May and we have a lovely little forest of asparagus trees again this year.    Claire planted cosmos in the middle of the bed - we thought the tall pink and white flowers would look nice later in the summer. 

Asparagus Bed

They look sort of like a handful of dried mini-squid, but really it's a handful of dormant, bare-root asparagus plants. We got 24 plants of Martha Washington asparagus and put them in their new home last week.

[This will be a permanent spot for the asparagus.   I'll load it up on chicken dirt in the fall.] 

First I dug the bed over well to loosen the soil, then we dug three trenches longways in the bed - about 8 inches deep.    Then we opened the roots out and put the plants in.  

Then we covered the plants over lightly with about 6 inches of soil - leaving the rest in hills between the trenches.   When new growth appears, we'll cover them the rest of the way and plant some parsley, basil and some mixed flowers in there for company.   

Doesn't look like much now, but it should be gorgeous in July.