Mark Hutton: Hi, my name is Mark Hutton.
I'm the University of Maine Cooperative Extension vegetable specialist and today we're going
to talk about planting asparagus.
When you make your soil trench to plant the asparagus, you can do it with a shovel.
You can do it with a hoe.
It doesn't really matter.
The idea is that you want to have a trench about six to eight inches deep.
Planting depth is going to vary depending on the type of soil you're in.
If you're in a light, sandy soil you may want to go a little bit deeper.
If you're in a heavier soil that tends to hold moisture, we can plant a little bit shallower.
Another consideration to think about is that shallow planted crowns result in smaller spear
diameter.
We don't get as large of spears, but they tend to emerge and harvest tends to be a little
bit earlier in the spring.
However, they are also more susceptible to frost damage.
Deeper planted crowns are going to give you larger spears, but maturity or when you're
going to be cutting spears in the spring might be a little bit later just because we're waiting
for the soil to warm up.
It's going to take longer for it to warm up down deep.
We've made our planting trench.
You can see it's fairly wide and it's about eight inches deep.
Now, your soil test recommendation is going to tell you to put two thirds of the phosphorus
in the root zone when you're getting ready to plant.
We've made our trench and now we're going to add our phosphorus.
This could be something like a triple superphosphate.
We're just going to scatter this in.
The amount you're going to apply is going to be based on your soil test recommendation.
Our asparagus crowns have arrived.
If they arrive before you're ready to plant them, you can store them safely in your refrigerator.
Once they arrive, we want to take them out and unroll them.
What we have here is a bundle of 10 crowns.
These are the variety Jersey Supreme.
Once you have your asparagus, you want to unpack it.
We're going to sort these crowns by size.
You can see as I lay them out, we've got quite a range of sizes.
The reason why we want to sort our crowns out based on size is we want to plant similar
size crowns closer together.
Here's a good example of an asparagus crown.
The asparagus crown is made up of an underground stem, which is right here.
You can see some of the buds developing.
Those are what are going to form the spears next summer and then the root system.
The root system is composed of two types of roots.
These larger, fleshy storage roots which are simply storage organs and then these smaller,
feeder roots.
These are the roots, these small feeder roots are the ones that take up nutrients and water.
Before you plant your crowns, one of the things you're going to want to do is check a few
of your crowns and just cut this storage root.
If you see, these are bright and white, indicating that they're very, very healthy.
If we were to cut them and they appeared brown or discolored, that would be a good indication
that this crown is already suffering or has a low level of fusarium infection.
Fusarium is a soil borne disease which eventually is going to lead to the decline of your asparagus
planting.
Now, it's time to start planting our asparagus.
We're going to begin by just laying our crowns out.
We want to have our furrow wide enough that we can comfortably spread out the roots without
a lot of interference with the sides of the trench.
We're going to space our crowns about a foot apart.
There's a couple of ways you can go with covering these crowns.
If you look at some of the older information, they talk about adding about one to two inches
of soil when you first start to cover them.
The choice is yours.
You can either cover them all in one time or do it an inch or two at a time every couple
of weeks.
In this case, we're just going to cover them.
The other thing I'm going to do is mark where the head of the row is because it's going
to take a week or two or more before we start to see spears start to emerge.