How to Grow Asparagus

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good a welcome to I cultivate my name's Steve and today we're going to be looking at some of the finer details of looking after and maintaining your asparagus plants as a perennial vegetable asparagus is a really interesting plant and understanding the stages that it goes through across a 12-month period is really important to knowing how to care and maintain this plant the first thing to note about asparagus is that across a 12-month period it essentially goes through two stages firstly a growth the stage and secondly a dormancy stage now this asparagus here is coming towards the end of its growth stage and I can tell this by here on the bottom here we can start to see some of the asparagus fern fronds are starting to actually die back but the reason why it goes through a growth phase at all is because most of the activity with an asparagus plant actually occurs right down in the bottom right in the crown which when planted was planted approximately 30 centimeters under the ground and it's that crown that we have to look after to ensure that we get a wonderful harvest of asparagus each year so often those gardeners who like their garden to look nice and neat and tidy will often feel as if they need to give this asparagus a bit of a trim back a bit of a trim to make it look more tidy but you need to refrain from trimming it back the reason for that is because this asparagus is currently photosynthesizing it's currently producing food producing sugars and those sugars are being pushed down into the crown and the crown is storing those and is growing so you have to allow this asparagus to grow and to put that energy down into the crown because it's that crown that ultimately when the time is right is going to produce those wonderful asparagus spears that you will be harvesting for your dinner table so when do you know it is time to trim this asparagus back well let's have a look at a couple of things first firstly you can see as this asparagus is grown you can see that there have been some berries here that are formed in addition to that on some of these other asparagus our fronds you can see here that we've got some very small fine flowers now these flowers actually are producing either stamens or the stigmas depending upon whether they're male or female ultimately the flowers are going to form these berries and in time these berries are going to go red and I should take this moment to mention that these berries are in fact poisonous so please avoid them at all costs so sometime after the flowers and the berries are formed what you're going to find is that your asparagus plant is going to appear to start to die back you'll start to see dead fronds appearing and ultimately the entire thing will die back once it has died back then you can trow it back not before remember don't be tempted to trim back before it is totally died back so when exactly should you trim it back well the best answer to that is getting towards winter depending upon which hemisphere of the world it is that you live in so just before winter you will find that our Sparrow gas plant is going to die back and once totally died back then you trim and you trim it back right to the ground level once trimmed back you've got to feed the crown the crown is that part of the asparagus plant that is going to produce all that wonderful growth that you're going to harvest sometime in the spring so once trimmed back make sure you put a really good layer of organic material various manures compost and also don't forget a really good layer of mulch because particularly if you live in an area that is prone to Frost's you want to make sure that you protect the crown from frost damage so all going well you can be expecting to be harvesting some wonderful asparagus spears sometime early spring but there are some things about harvesting you've got to be aware firstly remember if your asparagus crowns are very young if they are say for example a year old you really should not be harvesting you really need to allow the asparagus to grow and to put energy down into the crown so it can grow and develop you shouldn't be harvesting any asparagus until the crown is at least two years old even then don't harvest any asparagus spears that are less than one centimeter in diameter and you will find then that as you get into your third and fourth year that you'll be able to harvest asparagus probably about 80% of all the spears that actually emerge for about ten weeks so to summarize a few things to keep in mind firstly don't forget that it's the crown of the asparagus that we're really trying to look after and that means that we don't trim these fronds back until they have actually died back I know how tempting that might be particularly if you like it to look all nice neat and tidy but don't trim them back until they have actually died back where you trim them back trim them back to ground level once you've trimmed them back we need to feed the crown of the asparagus make sure that you add a good layer of mixed manures compost and then finish it off with a layer of mulch particularly if you happen to live in an area which is susceptible to frost and is quite cold the last thing that we really need to be mindful of our guess is that don't harvest young asparagus crowns make sure that your asparagus crowns are more than a year old and if they are more than a year old that say two years even then don't harvest spears that are less than one centimeter in diameter once you have got your asparagus plants being three and four years old then you can harvest probably 80% of your spears but only harvest for ten weeks once that 10 weeks is up you need to make sure you're allowed to grow to then start the cycle again to start feeding the crown for the following year's harvest now hope you've enjoyed this video can I please ask you to go down to the thumbs up and give us a thumbs up subscribe to this channel and go to our website I cultivate dotnet and become a member of the community thanks for watching [Music]
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Channel: iCultivate
Views: 332,826
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Gardening, garden, organic, vegetable, sustainable, How to grow asparagus, asparagus, asparagus spears, growing asparagus
Id: tgIsDoTpoWw
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 6min 47sec (407 seconds)
Published: Sun Jan 07 2018
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