How to Plant Asparagus
Done right, planting a bed of asparagus is a once-in-a-generation affair. Other than artichokes, capers and rhubarb, asparagus is the only perennial vegetable regularly featured in North American cuisine – it will send up those slender, succulent stalks each spring for decades if it is given a happy home.
Done right, planting a bed of asparagus is a once-in-a-generation affair. Other than artichokes, capers and rhubarb, asparagus is the only perennial vegetable regularly featured in North American cuisine — it will send up those slender, succulent stalks each spring for decades if it is given a happy home. Early spring, before its roots awaken from dormancy, is the traditional planting time.
But be prepared, this is no ordinary vegetable crop. Asparagus has a colorful history and seductive personality. And it is probably the most demanding vegetable there is to get started.
It’s possible to grow asparagus by seed, but most farmers and gardeners leave this part to a professional nursery because the seed is so finicky to germinate. Instead, buying asparagus ‘crowns’ – a technical term for the dormant roots – is recommended. They look like a strange sea creature with roots for tentacles and a head in the middle where the spears sprout.
The dormant crowns are available at local garden centers for a brief window in early spring, after the ground thaws, but before the crowns start sprouting. If you miss that window, it’s still possible to order them online from nurseries farther north. Some growers keep asparagus crowns in their walk-in cooler to prolong dormancy so southern gardeners running late on the garden season have something to plant.
Heirloom varieties like ‘Martha Washington’ are still quite popular, though they produce male and female plants. Female asparagus plants produce pretty red berries in fall, but they make far fewer spears. To get a larger harvest, many growers opt for all-male hybrid varieties like ‘Jersey Giant’ or ‘UC 157’, which are highly productive and usually more disease-resistant than the heirloom types. ‘Purple Passion’ is one of the many varieties that produce purple spears. Growing white asparagus is a matter of layering soil over the spears so they don’t produce chlorophyll; you can do this with any variety.
Ten crowns will fit in a 4-by-8-foot bed and are generally enough to supply a family of four. Try to time your purchase so the asparagus crowns can go in the ground without delay. If you have to store the crowns for more than a day or two, place them in a bucket of moist sand in a basement or other cool environment until you are ready to plant.
Asparagus likes rich, well-drained, non-acidic soil. For best results, copious quantities of soil amendments should be incorporated into the planting bed to provide long-term fertility.
*Your local cooperative extension service office can test your soil pH and tell you exactly how much lime to add to bring it up to 7.
It’s important to wait at least one year after planting asparagus before making the first harvest so the plants can put as much energy as possible into developing a root system. In the second year, it’s OK to harvest any spears larger than a pencil for a week or so. In the third year, increase the harvest period to two weeks and in the fourth and subsequent years you can harvest all the spears that emerge over a six-week period.
Unharvested spears will unfurl into a lacy canopy of foliage about 3 or 4 feet tall by early summer. Allowing the stalks to grow each year is necessary for maintaining a strong root system – making it possible for the asparagus to come back year after year with bigger and bigger spears.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].by Brian Barth, Modern Farmer
April 3, 2015
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
SubmitNecessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and are used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies.
hi, It’s July 5 and I have 10 Sweet Purple plants from Netherland Bulb Co. I want to get them into the ground..can I plant them right now?
Sproutng tge asparagus seeds was simple…working out what to do with 250 seedlings is more problematic?
Do they grow better near a fence with shade in the mornings?
Appreciate the information on planting asparagus
I am looking at purchasing 3 yr old male crowns.
Can they be harvested in the first season?
Respectfully,
Kenny
Great info.
Is there a way to kill asparagus?….have them taking over the garden and need gone
I planted 20 crowns 4 weeks ago, did it exact to textbook instructions. When should I expect to see any growth? So far, nothing. I’m a little anxious thinking I should be seeing something
I’ve found some growing wild.
When is the best time to move them?
And would I have to make them go dormant before planting them???
I’m figuring on letting them seed and moving them at a later date/year??
The asparagus do we need to cut some of the plant out
My asparagus plant grow a lot of new plants
Or just leave it and let grow
It plant is about six month old