Mark Hutton: Hi, my name's Mark Hutton, and I'm the University of Maine Cooperative Extension
vegetable specialist. Today we're going to start talking about asparagus. The topic today
is going to be bed preparation or what you should be doing at the beginning of the year
to establish your asparagus planting.
One of the things you want to think about is site location. The reason being is that
when you put your asparagus in, you're going to live with that planting for 10 or 12, maybe
even 15 years. Give a lot of consideration as to where you're going to put that asparagus.
Some of the things you want to think about are, you want to have well-drained soil. Asparagus
doesn't like to have wet feet. You want to be in a spot where there's good air movement
so the ferns will stay dry after a rain or rapidly dry after a rain. That will help eliminate
a lot of foliar diseases. You also want to be sure that you're not in a frost pocket,
somewhere that gets late spring frosts, because that's going to damage the spears as they're
starting to emerge.
The first step after you've identified where you're going to plant your asparagus is to
get a soil test. Ideally, you would start this one year ahead of when you plan to establish
your asparagus planting. Get your soil test from University of Maine Cooperative Extension
-- you can get a soil test kit with the box that the soil goes in -- and the information
sheet. Be sure to mark down that the crop you're going to plant is asparagus.
There's a good University of Maine YouTube video about how to take a soil test, but I'd
just like to reinforce that with asparagus you want to be sure to sample down about 12
inches deep, because that's where the roots are going to be.
All right. We've gotten our soil test results back, we know what we need to add to the soil,
and we're going to begin to start preparing the ground for planting. We're going to do
this in the early spring. We're not going to plant until soil temperatures get up to
about 50 degrees. If we plant earlier than that, we really run the risk of the crowns
rotting in the soil while we wait for it to warm up.
We know what we're going to apply. In this case, we're going to apply some compost to
the top of the soil just to help add some organic matter. We've got our compost here.
We've got a five gallon bucket of compost. This five gallon bucket should cover an area
of about 10 by 10, or 100 square feet. More than that, you run the risk of just adding
too much compost.
We've marked off an area of about 10 by 10. We're just going to scatter the compost. You can see that it really isn't
a thick layer. Next, we can add our fertilizer. When we add our fertilizer that we're going
to incorporate into the soil, we're going to...
You'll notice that on the soil test recommendation, it's going to tell you to put about two-thirds
of the phosphorous in the soil trench that we plant the asparagus in. Mostly what we're
applying here is going to be nitrogen and potassium. Again, based on our soil test recommendations,
we can just scatter this across the area. Now you can use your rototiller to work this
into the soil.
All right, we've amended our soil. We've applied compost and fertilizer according to our soil
test recommendations, we've rototilled it into the soil, and now we're ready to get
set to plant. We can just take a straight line or a string line and run it across just to mark out where our row is going to
be, just so that we keep it nice and straight.
If you're planting multiple rows of asparagus, we want to set the rows about five feet apart.
That will help with air movement and air drainage. We also would like to orient the rows with
the prevailing wind so the wind blows down through the rows and helps to dry the ferns
after dews in the morning or after rainstorms. Again, this will help reduce foliar diseases.
What we're talking about here is a more conventional establishing an asparagus bed just like you
would in a vegetable garden. You do have another option, and that would be to plant your asparagus
in a perennial bed or as a perennial border.
When we're going to do that, you still want a soil test, you still want to amend the soil,
and you want to put two-thirds of the phosphorous in the bottom of the planting hole. The phosphorous
isn't going to move very far through this soil, and that's the only chance you're going
to get to put that phosphorous in the root zone.