Some folks don’t know that asparagus is a subarctic hardy perennial, perfect for most northern growing zones! Hardy all the way down to zone 3 and up to zone 10, it surprises some northern gardeners that they can grow such a culinary delicacy right in their back yard! We’ve had very good survival rates in our zone 3 garden, probably close to 90% survival over their first winter.
Asparagus can be easily grown from seed, typically sowing them around 12 weeks to last frost. Even now would be a fine time for sowing them, though. We are growing the Mary Washington variety, the most common type you will find. There’s also an alternate sowing method using what are called crowns. We’ve found crowns a bit more difficult to acquire, but it does allow sowing directly into your beds around last frost as opposed to starting them from seed so early. From seed is our favorite, though, as they produce an incredible fern like growing stalk and are just an attractive plant all around. (Which also makes them a serious pain to photograph due to their fine leafing structure.)
Asparagus will tend to “migrate” and spread out a bit, so it’s good to select a relatively isolated bed for growing them. You want to offer each plant about a foot of growing space to fully fill out. As with most perennials, it will take several years before you will get harvestable crop. Typically the third year is your first harvestable season, but asparagus will continue to produce for 20 to 30 years after sowing!
We are super excited as this will be our third year growing them and we *might* be able to get a small harvest! Our eleventy billion feet of snow can seriously start melting all ready!
How deep are the beds you have asparagus in. I’ve read that their roots grow very deep so wondering about any permafrost layer. I’m in southern Yukon so similar growing conditions to where you are
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Our current asparagus beds are about 10 inches deep and they’ve been OK to see perennial growth and basic crown development. Our “big picture, long term” goal with our current, small asparagus beds is to allow transplanting of our crowns into a more permanent asparagus gardening location. We didn’t dive into it much here (as we’re learning about asparagus, still!), but there’s male and female asparagus plants. Our goal with our current beds is to create male plants, which yield higher and to ultimately discard the female plants. Once we’ve got our more permanent asparagus beds in place, the idea is that we can raise asparagus by seed, sex them over 2-3 seasons (since we don’t have a long enough season to see definitive results in just one season) and basically get on a transplant schedule of every other year. These “permanent” beds will be in-ground, and thus as deep as the plants want to root. Nonetheless, we’d be comfortable even with relatively low depth beds, around 10 to 12 inches.
Thank you for that. I have a battle with invading willows and I’ve just resorted to wood based raised beds to see if they prevent the roots from getting in.
with asparagus being perennial I’d thought to set that bed up using permaculture techniques and am debating if 16 inches will be sufficient height or should plan for my