Perennial Food Garden Series - Asparagus

When you crave asparagus, nothing else will do. Its unique spear shape and subtle flavor are inimitable in the vegetable world. Asparagus also has a certain cachet as a vegetable and people tend to reserve it for special occasions. Easy to grow and prolific over time, asparagus is a mainstay of the Perennial Food Garden.

Asparagus is one of my favorite vegetables. It's a crunchy raw veggie that makes an excellent dipper, it's a great vegetable cooked al dente for pasta salads, it marinates well with herbed olive oil and vinegar, it's classic in Asian stir-fry, and who can resist steamed asparagus lavished with Hollandaise sauce!

Luckily, on my property, asparagus grows like a weed - literally. The former 10-acre pasture is dotted sparsely with deeply rooted 'wild' asparagus plants. I've tried to dig some of them, but they are rooted far too deep in very compacted soil!

Plants that grow wild at various distances like that tells you that they are plants grown from seeds that blew across the field, with only a few managing to take root and mature.

And that is exactly true of asparagus. While you can grow asparagus from seeds, you will have a head start by buying 'crowns' from an online commercial grower, a local nursery, or through mail order catalogs.

For my garden, I purchased crowns in the Fall from commercial growers. The first year I planted Jersey Knight and the next year I planted Purple Passion. The two beds are each four-feet by eight-feet and I planted 10 crowns in each bed.

There are all kinds of instructions about how deep and how far apart to plant asparagus, but the one caveat that is true for growing healthy, productive plants is that the location for the beds must have full sun.

Some guides will have you dig an 18-inch trench and plant the crowns at the bottom of the trench. When the spears start to come up, you keep piling the dirt back into the trench around them. The idea is to keep the spears out of the sunlight so that you get the gourmet 'white' asparagus instead of green.

I planted my Jersey Knights using this trench method and it was a tremendous amount of digging! I've never actually gotten white asparagus from doing this because I didn't keep covering the spears after the first year when I got the trench filled back up to soil level. But the plants seem to like being rooted that far beneath the soil line because the first-year plants grew a number of thin spears and some good-sized ferns. I picked a few spears the first year and let the plants take hold.

The second year, my Jersey Knights grew double the number of spears. The spears were also double the size in height and circumference before I picked them. The plants shot up to a height of about five feet and were tremendously bushy with beautiful, feathery fern-like leaves. The plants produced little black fruits about the size of a pea, and in the Fall, the ferns turned yellow and the fruits turned red.

Each year, I have more and more Jersey Knight spears. It's best to harvest them while they are still under six-inches tall. The taller and thicker the spears get, the tougher they are to eat and they are not as tasty.

I planted the Purple Passions in an entirely different way. I placed the crowns about six inches below the soil line - that was a lot less digging in the Fall! The following Spring, only a few tiny little spears poked through the earth (which I did not harvest) and very small, six-inch tall feathery plants stood sparsely in the bed.

It took another full year in the ground before the Purple Passions began to flourish and thrive and fill up the plot.

I keep the soil healthy in the asparagus beds by adding compost thinly and providing nutrients with organic plant food. My favorite supplements are the crystals I can measure into a container that is then attached to my hose. That way I can water and feed simultaneously.

Now both the Jersey Knights and Purple Passions are productive and lush during the summer. When harvesting, I snap off spears by hand - it is safer than cutting with scissors or knives because I don't risk damaging my plants.

I must admit that asparagus meets all the criteria for my Perennial Garden Series (easily grown, prolific, versatile, and returns year after year) except one - it does not mature rapidly. All the other plants in the series - sunchokes, strawberries, lovage, rhubarb, horseradish - can be harvested in the first growing season, but with asparagus, to get the first good sized harvest, you may have to wait three or four years.

On the bright side, the plants get bigger and bigger each year and become a feathery, dense hedge. Plus, by the third year, you may find as I did, that neighboring beds will sprout tiny little asparagus plants. In my garden, windblown asparagus seeds had dropped to the soil and sprouted! In the Fall now, I always locate any 'seed grown' asparagus and transfer those plants to the asparagus beds where they have beefed up my 'hedge'.

During the height of the fern growth, check your plants daily for Japanese beetles. Use a good organic spray suitable for vegetable gardens to get rid of the beetles as soon as you spot a few because they can eat tremendous amounts of foliage rapidly, thus damaging your bed's production.

When you finally get to a productive harvest year, you'll find that perhaps the best tasting asparagus is raw, right out of the garden - especially the tips. Raw asparagus is a natural for green salads, pasta salads, and hors d'oeuvres trays in the Summer.

If you are cooking asparagus, be careful not to over-cook it, otherwise you will have a mushy mess that is best put in the blender and made into soup or dip! I've cooked asparagus spears to my taste by dropping them in boiling water or steaming them for a few minutes. Some cookbooks recommend standing the spears in an inch of water and boiling. During the summer, I love to grill just about everything I eat, and asparagus spears can be charred to a blackened crispiness over charcoal. You can also bake, fry, sauté, and deep-fry asparagus as a side dish.

Eventually, you will have asparagus beds that will produce more than you can eat during one season, so you will want to preserve the additional spears. For me, all methods of preserving asparagus - freezing, canning, or drying - will make it soft, so plan to use preserved asparagus in soups, sauces, soufflés, marinades, and dips.

At my house, the method of preservation is more dependent on how much room there is in the freezer and how many canning jars I have on hand.

Asparagus! Worth the wait - once you've got a productive asparagus bed, you'll have fresh green vegetables first thing in the spring and a bounty in the pantry all year!

The Perennial Food Garden Series highlights fruits, vegetables, and herbs that are easily grown, mature rapidly, are prolific in production, versatile in recipes, and return year after year. The series highlights the top perennials to create a perfect food garden that is economical to start and easy to maintain.