The Potager

The Potager

Thursday, April 7, 2011

A new home for the Asparagus

You gotta love a garden vegetable that is a cultivated weed, basically.


Last summer, in an effort to smooth out the backyard where my pre-Potager garden was, my hubby plowed down the asparagus bed. I literally cried over those lost asparagus.

But then, lo and behold, they grew back.
And in spite of the fact that it was totally the wrong time of year to transplant asparagus, in August, in one of the hottest summers on record, I dug them up and transplanted them into the Potager.  You can see the original post about this by clicking on the highlighted words.
There wasn't enough room in the Potager because it was filled with tomato roots. They were planted way too shallow.

A few weeks later, during another heat wave, I dug up some more and threw them in a pile of dirt behind the Potager just to try to save them.

Then this year I ordered too many strawberries, so the Asparagus had to be moved yet again.
But where? We live in the Pine Barrens and our natural dirt is sand. There was no place to put all the asparagus I had dug up.
I left them in a tub trug with some dirt and covered them with a damp towel for several days. Days with cool nights and thunderstorms and torrential rain and wind.

After work today, I dug up the pile of dirt that I had thrown the second batch of Asparagus in. There was way too much dirt in there and I piled it into a wheel barrow. About half of the Asparagus I dug out of this bed had survived and were showing signs of life. (Hubby had put a wooden box around the dirt pile a month or so ago.)
I was so busy digging that I never even noticed that hubby had made two more boxes for me! We moved the boxes near the new Asparagus bed.
I dug a trench and mounded some compost in the center of the trench.



I then laid out the best looking Asparagus on the mound, then gently filled in the trench, leaving just the "eyes" near the surface.

I repeated this for one of the new boxes my husband had made. The wheel barrow full of dirt came in handy.

I've read that deer and rabbits don't like Asparagus, but I'm thinking I may need a fence to keep Smokey and Binx from using this as a litter box.

The finished bed. We won't be swimming in Asparagus, but hopefully, in a few years, it will meet our needs.

I'll put landscape fabric down and make a mulch path because there won't be enough room to mow the grass weeds between the beds.

The other bed will hold the two raspberry plants I bought last month. I just need to find some soil with which to fill it.




So there they are, tucked into their new, and hopefully final, home, having survived being plowed under, moved in 100 degree heat, left unplanted in a tub trug covered with a towel during a thunderstorm and replanted once more.

Yup, you gotta love a garden vegetable that is basically a cultivated weed - and survives like a weed! Thank God!

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