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- What you see before me here is my asparagus patch
and it did really well this year.
And all of this asparagus, I should mention,
was started from seed,
not crown, and we did harvest from it this year.
We actually got somewhere on the order of 20, 30 spears
and you could tell that the plants didn't suffer from it.
And actually I just noticed today
that they are shooting up some new spears again.
So that's actually pretty interesting
but I'll probably leave them
so they could get more energy stored.
But one thing that did become a problem was
I barely watered this bed.
I barely cared for it whatsoever
and most of the plants made it
and are extremely happy and thriving
but some of 'em did not make it.
So we're going to actually be replacing those today.
What I have in my hands here
are three green asparagus starts
which are gonna go right here, two of them there,
one in the front corner there.
And then back here I have six purple asparagus.
And all the six purple asparagus are gonna go in a line
right here.
So we need to do a little bit of cleanup
and some amending by adding compost and mulch.
So let's go ahead and just get straight into that right now.
While I was getting ready to set up
and plant these new asparagus starts,
I actually just noticed a new problem.
This plant right here, the one at my base,
is actually a female.
The reason you could tell that it's a female
is that it has these berries right here.
These berries are where all the seeds are produced.
So if the plant is spending all its energy to produce seeds
then that means in the next spring,
it's going to produce less spears.
So generally when it comes to asparagus,
you wanna actually only have male plants.
Now all these asparagus were started from seed.
When you start from seed, it's kind of a roll of the dice.
You don't know if you're gonna get male or female.
And generally when you plant crowns,
they are pre-selected and you're usually only getting males.
So that was the cost of using the seeds.
But out of all the plants, only one ended up being female.
So not a big deal.
I'm just going to end up ripping this one out entirely
and swapping it in with some of those new seedlings.
So let me bring you in a little closer
and I'll show you the berries
and then I'll bring you in a little closer
on a male plant so you can see the difference.
So there is a close up of the actual leaf of the asparagus
with some of the berries on there.
You see that they get pretty big
and I think they eventually go red when they start ripening
but if you see this on your asparagus plant,
it's not the end of the world,
you might just get a little less production.
And generally the female spears are apparently
a little slimmer,
which I actually prefer.
But in this case, my asparagus isn't that thick anyway
and I'd rather have more production
since I only have a small patch.
So this plant's gonna go.
Now let's go take a look at a male plant.
Right here is actually a male plant.
So I know it's a male
because if you look inside the flowers themselves,
if you see any amount of orange essentially
then you know you have a male.
Both the female and male plants will produce flowers
but they can be very hard to distinguish.
But if you look inside and you see kind of,
I believe it's normally called four dots
I don't think that's gonna show up
but I'll bring a close up on my phone.
If you see those four orange dots,
then you know you have a male plant
and you're good to go.
So here's a close up of the male plant
and it actually has a little bug in there,
I'm not sure what that is.
But basically if you see that yellow orange color,
then you know it, it's a male.
If you see a a green ball at the bottom of the flower,
then it's most likely a female.
Now that we know for a fact
that this is indeed a female plant,
I actually have three transplants.
I wish I had four
or five of the green variety,
but that's fine.
I'll do 1, 2, 3, basically swapping in
the other asparagus exactly for where this one is.
So now I'm gonna grab the plant,
try to rip out as many of the crown roots as I can
and we'll probably also dig some out as well.
Now we're up close
and personal with the asparagus plant itself.
So I've got my trusted trowel here.
I'm gonna go out from the outside,
shove it in
and try to pry it.
But I think I'm gonna have to do a combination of prying
and pulling.
There you have it.
This is what a really poor quality asparagus crown
would look like.
A lot of these roots are broken.
Hopefully if you order them,
your roots are a lot longer than this.
I didn't do quite a good job of extracting all those roots
but I think I definitely got enough of it
that it's not coming back.
So now let's go ahead and prep this area a little bit
and plant out those new seedlings.
So I actually decided to excavate the plant
so I could see the root system
and show you guys up close.
And it shows something very interesting about asparagus
and that's this guy right here.
If you've ever heard of white asparagus
it's usually a delicacy.
It's very popular in places like Germany and Austria.
But basically the deal is that
if you bury asparagus underground,
usually with a bunch of straw
it is devoid of light just like you would blanche a leek.
And then the asparagus itself remains white,
just like this one is here.
If it never sees the light a day, then it will stay white.
So usually the white asparagus is more tender
and that's why it's prized.
So that's why people usually go through a lot of work
to bury their asparagus to make white spears.
It's not a special cultivar,
it's just an asparagus that hasn't seen the light a day.
But let's get back to ripping this guy out.
The plan today is to do 12 inch spacing
for any of the green asparagus
and we're gonna do 10 inch spacing for the purple asparagus.
I'll tell you why that one's a little closer in a bit.
So if I come in over here,
I'm gonna measure 12 inches out from where that crown stops
and then I have a little hole marked.
And then from this one, I'm gonna do the same, 12 inches,
make sure that I'm 12 inches this way, I'm good.
And then since I have three plants rather than four,
I usually would go one, two, do another two,
but I only have one.
So I'm gonna do a 12 inch diagonal
which brings me right here in both directions.
So now we have that set.
I'm probably not going to do much to amend this
because as you could see,
this asparagus is doing really well on its own,
it doesn't need that much.
We'll amend more for the purple
because I stopped amending it
at the edge of the asparagus bed as is.
But let's get those starts out
and I'll show you what I will do instead.
Here are my three green asparagus starts
that I'm going to be putting in.
This is a variety called UC-157 F2
So F2 means it's a hybrid.
The rest of the name I'm not sure,
but this is from the same place
that Kevin recently got his starts
for his asparagus bed.
So I wanted to try them out.
So let's take a look at the roots.
They are forming a crown.
So this is what an asparagus root looks like.
It's very thick, it could get very long, it goes very deep.
So in this bed here, for example,
these roots can end up going like 20 feet into the ground
and they're gonna be here for 15 years at least.
So in order to give 'em the best start possible,
what I have in this plate here, this little saucer,
is actually some mycorrhizal inoculant.
This is from MYKOS,
and it's kind of like the most reputable brand
of mycorrhizal inoculant that I've seen at least.
So I wanna make sure that I have full root contact
when I'm applying this.
That's how you really make sure
that the mycorrhizal attaches to the right spot.
What this will do is it'll give this asparagus the advantage
of having the mycorrhizal fungi right on its roots already.
And what that does is it will actually,
it's been actually proven that they'll form a relationship
with the roots
and that'll help the asparagus plants look for water,
look for nutrients.
In exchange, it'll give sugars to these mycorrhizal.
So that's a great way to make sure that,
especially when you're doing something
like an asparagus plant,
I don't want to come plant this again in another year
hopefully, of course, this is a male plant
but that's all there is to it.
I'm giving it that boost of mycorrhizal.
The soil already looks really fantastic
because I applied a ton of compost
and leaves on top of this
before I planted the original crop of asparagus.
So now I'm gonna go ahead
and just plant out the rest of this asparagus.
So there's actually a lot of advice out there
for when it comes to transplanting asparagus
that you wanna do all these things with trenches
and all sorts of fancy little ways
of basically making it turn into more work,
as far as I'm concerned.
At least here in San Diego,
I transplanted all these seedlings, just like this,
at soil level
and as they grow, I just keep adding mulch.
So once these new babies grow in a little bit more,
I'll come in and I'll probably mulch it up to here
and I'll use a combination of leaves, if I can find it,
wood chips and straw.
And that'll give me the best chance of creating a rich soil
with a lot of mulch and water retention.
So now that these three green asparagus are in,
let's go ahead and take a look back here
where we're gonna prep it for some purple asparagus.
The first thing we need to do
is clean up this area a little bit.
The idea is that from right where that brick is,
I want to bring in the purple asparagus
right next to the green one here.
So a couple things I'll point out is I'm gonna rip out
some of these plants like this sulfur cosmos here.
It's kind of on its way out anyway
and I need this area
and anything that's in the way.
I'll point out a couple things here.
I have some strawberries planted in this section.
I never really got much fruit off of it,
but asparagus and strawberries are considered
a classic companion plant.
I just don't think they get enough sun here to fruit,
especially when this, once this gets huge,
and this this tree above me starts shading out this area.
So I'll probably leave them anyway just to see how they do.
And up front there is actually a rhubarb plant.
So that rhubarb plant is doing quite well.
I'll definitely wanna save that.
And we're gonna just keep the asparagus right here.
So I'm gonna do a little bit of cleanup
and then we'll add some compost and talk about all that.
So I've laid out the general area
where I wanna plant these asparagus.
I'm going to go a foot off the wall there.
And then every 10 inches,
I'm going to be putting a purple asparagus.
I have at least a foot distance
from all these crowns here
and a foot from this wall here
that I can fit all my plants in.
The reason why I'm going closer with the purple
is that the closer you get, the smaller the spears are
and smaller spears apparently for purple asparagus is better
because purple asparagus is really good for using raw,
eating it on salads, things like that.
And I've discovered that I quite like the raw asparagus.
So we're gonna plant 'em a little bit tighter
which is also great
'cause I don't have that much space to spare.
So I'm gonna start there
but first I'm gonna clear all the straw out,
lay in some of this nice compost
and then start building it in.
Each one of these plants is now spaced 10 inches across
in this trench.
You'll notice that I basically dug a trench,
dumped all that compost in
but then I didn't just put the plants on there,
actually pulled it aside.
And the reason I did that
is because I want these plants to be contacting
the actual ground that's already been fertile
and it's already hydrated.
This compost is a little bit dry
so I don't wanna plant directly into that
and then have the problem of rehydrating it.
So I'm definitely gonna come back in
and water this very well
'cause I wanna make sure the compost is well watered.
But for now, I want it to contact the ground.
So let's go ahead, pop all these guys out,
give them a little mycorrhizal dust bath
and get on to the next step.
So there's the root ball, here's the mycorrhizal powder.
You're gonna wanna put it in
and you're gonna wanna dredge it on all sides.
This way, you make sure that you have
as much contact with the roots as possible
'cause you want it right on the roots.
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Now that we have 'em planted,
I'm going to just push the compost up against them
and essentially mound them up.
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The last step before watering them in
is to spread some mulch on top.
This is actually mulch
that was made from the tree that's sitting right above it.
And all I did is I collected off
a bunch of the lower branches
and shipped them up.
So it's perfect mulch.
Let's go ahead and spread it out.
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Got my sprinkler.
We're gonna go ahead and set this guy up
and I'm gonna try to do it without getting too wet.
The way I like to do that is I pinch the hose like this,
then I turn this on,
and then slowly back off.
You know what?
I think that was a very solid day.
I'm really happy I discovered that female asparagus plant.
And again, the reason why that's such a big deal is that
if you didn't catch it and those seeds started to fall
you are now self-seeding your bed of asparagus
and you saw how hard it was to get those roots out.
You don't want a bunch of little asparagus plants
popping out
which could then also be female plants.
So as soon as you identify them,
your best chance is to go ahead and rip 'em out
and replace them as soon as you can.
That's it for today's video guys.
I hope you guys learn something about asparagus.
That was pretty fun,
and I'll see you guys next time.
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