Plant Asparagus Now and Eat Well for Twenty Years

Quick answer: Plant one-year-old crowns in early spring, in full sun and well-drained soil, in a spot you'll never need for anything else. Harvest nothing the first year, a couple of weeks the second, and a full six to eight weeks from the third on. Zones 3 through 8 are the sweet spot.

The wait is the whole price

Every other vegetable in your yard is a one-season deal. You plant, you tend, you eat, you tear it out in October. Asparagus doesn't work that way. You put it in the ground this spring, and for two springs it gives you nothing but ferns.

Then the third spring arrives, and spears come up out of the dirt every morning for two months. A well-sited, well-kept bed keeps going for fifteen to twenty years, and plenty run longer. You plant it once. Your kids will be eating from it when they're in high school.

That's why it suits a certain kind of man. It's a vegetable for people who plant things they won't harvest right away, which is most of what a good life is made of. Nobody builds a family, a business or a retirement account on a three-month horizon.

Pick the spot like you'll never move it

You can't move it. Well, you can, but you'll set the bed back to year one, so don't.

You need:

• Full sun. Six to eight hours at minimum.
• Drainage. Crowns sitting in standing water rot. If water pools there after a hard rain, pick somewhere else or build up a raised row.
• A permanent address. The edge of the garden, along a fence line, or a strip of its own. Not the middle of the plot you'll want to rototill every April.
• Soil near neutral. A pH around 6.5 to 7.5. A basic test kit costs little, and your county extension office can run a proper one.

Think about the long game with the house, too. If you're renting, or you know you'll sell in two years, this is a gift to the next family. That's fine, and it's a decent thing to leave behind. But decide on purpose.

Buy crowns, not seed

Seed adds a full extra year. Skip it. Buy one-year-old crowns, which look like a spider with a bad attitude, and put them in as soon as the soil can be worked. In the colder zones that's April or early May. In zones 7 and 8 it can be late winter.

Varieties worth knowing:

• Jersey Knight. An all-male hybrid. Male plants put their energy into spears instead of seed, so you get heavier harvests and fewer volunteer seedlings crowding the bed.
• Millennium. Another all-male variety, popular in cold country because it handles hard winters well.
• Purple Passion. Sweeter and more tender, and it turns green when you cook it. Kids like it for the color.
• Mary Washington. The old standby. Reliable, but it includes female plants, so expect some berries and seedlings.

Plan on ten to fifteen crowns per person who'll eat it. A family of four wants roughly forty. Crowns generally run a couple of dollars apiece, so call it eighty to a hundred dollars for a bed that feeds you for years. Prices vary by nursery and variety, so check yours. Nothing else in the garden pays you back this slowly or this long.

Planting day

Dig a trench about 12 inches wide and 6 to 8 inches deep. If you're making more than one row, space them 4 to 5 feet apart. Asparagus spreads, and you'll want room to walk.

Work a few inches of finished compost into the bottom. If you haven't got a pile going, compost that doesn't stink or feed the rats is the place to start. Then:

1. Set the crowns on the bottom, roots spread out like an octopus, buds facing up, 12 to 18 inches apart.
2. Cover them with about 2 inches of soil. That's all, for now.
3. Water well.
4. As the shoots grow over the next few weeks, keep adding soil until the trench is level with the ground.

Filling the trench slowly feels fussy. It isn't. Bury the crowns deep all at once and the shoots struggle to push through.

If you're building a bed instead, a 4x8 raised bed works, as long as you go at least a foot deep. Asparagus roots run long.

Weeds will try to kill it

This is the part nobody mentions on the seed packet. Young asparagus is a poor competitor. Spears are thin, ferns are wispy, and a bed that gets away from you in July can be lost by September.

Mulch the bed with 2 to 3 inches of straw or compost right after planting, and pull anything that pokes through. Pull by hand near the crowns. A hoe will take out spears you can't see yet.

Water about an inch a week through the first season, more in a dry stretch. Feed with compost every spring.

What you do in years one through three

Year one. Don't cut anything. The ferns are the plant's solar panels, and they're feeding the roots. Let them grow tall and feathery all summer.

Year two. Take spears for about two weeks, only the ones thicker than a pencil. Then stop and let the ferns grow.

Year three and after. Harvest for six to eight weeks. Cut or snap spears at 6 to 8 inches tall, at or just below the soil line. When the spears start coming up pencil-thin, quit. The plant is telling you it's tired.

Each fall, once the ferns have gone yellow or brown, cut them to about two inches and clear them out. Old fern is where pests overwinter. Then lay a fresh layer of compost on top.

This is where most people fail. They can't resist. They cut a handful in year one, "just to see." Don't. The roots haven't built enough reserves, and you're borrowing against the next twenty springs for one side dish.

What goes wrong

Waterlogged soil is the big one. Crowns rot, and you won't know until spring comes and nothing does. Weeds come second. Asparagus beetles are the third, small and metallic blue-black. A few of them are easy to pick off by hand. A lot of them mean you should clean up old fern more carefully.

Climate matters too. Asparagus needs a cold winter to go dormant. It does reliably well in zones 3 through 8. Farther south, with mild winters, results get patchy. Check your hardiness zone and call your county extension office before you spend money on crowns.

The fresh stuff is also nothing like the grocery store version. The first spear you cut and eat within the hour, sweet and snappy, will ruin you for the limp bundles in plastic.

Put the crowns in this spring. Mark the spot with a stake so nobody mows it, and leave a note on the garage wall with the planting date. In three years, you'll be glad you did.