Es lebe der Spargel

We have a kitchen garden surrounded by a quaint picket fence just outside our kitchen. Theoretically this is where you would grow those things you require in fresh yet small quantities for direct use in the course of your daily meal planning.  If you were to pay a call you'd conclude that it is a thoroughly disheveled kitchen garden.  It's in need of some long-overdue elbow grease and now that the porch contractors have moved-on this small, utilitarian garden patch will receive our full-time retired people attention.  It is important to note that this is where my spargel patch is situated.  

There is absolutely nothing more delicious than freshly-cut asparagus anointed in olive oil and delicately grilled with a sprinkle of fresh-cracked sea salt.  

Dunk a sprig in a Bloody Mary fashioned from my famous Uncle Dick's Tomato Juice and you'll think you've died and gone to heaven.  

Alas, all good things come to an end.  

After fifteen years of steady production my asparagus patch finally threw in the towel.  The spring crop started to decline beginning 2018 and this year only one, thin, lonely stalk, half the diameter of a straw, materialized.  

I'm not sure what the cause was; nevertheless, I was prepared for this eventuality.  When I placed my seed order with Jung in December I made certain to include the special two-pack featuring Jersey Supreme and Millennium Hybrid asparagus - twenty root crowns total.  

I got lucky with the advance planning because once the COVID-19 pandemic hit - everyone decided they wanted to grow their own victory garden.  Gardening companies have pretty much been cleaned-out of their seed inventory.  But I digress.

I excavated the original bed with a pick and shovel removing approximately six wheel barrows-full of soil and a tangle of dead and dying asparagus roots.  I also enlarged it a wee bit.  The roots made this a challenge - hence the pick-axe.

This was followed by laying a base of six forty-pound bags of composted cow manure.

The root crowns were carefully spaced atop the manure and six bags of rich topsoil blanketed over all.  A cup of Jung Asparagus Food was dissolved in a sprinkling can with two gallons of water and poured over all.

As the new shoots begin to materialize I'll add a minimum of three additional bags of topsoil to raise the bed as everything settles-in.

No harvest in 2021 and likely less than half of the largest shoots may be taken in the spring of 2022.  

It was back-breaking digging yet there-again nothing beats fresh, home-grown spargel.  Just ask our Labs.  They'll filch a stalk or two if you're not looking.  My hope is that this is the last asparagus patch I'll be establishing in my life.  Here anyways.    

Stay-tuned.....