Page 32 - Simply Veg 3.21

Cutting the grass
There appears to be only one person synonymous with asparagus and that
is the late Alfred W Kidner, his book ‘Asparagus’ first published in 1947 is possibly the ‘bible’ when it comes ‘grass’ or ‘sparrow grass’ as it was sometimes called by the old growers. He studied strains and genetics comparing it to breeding cattle to improve their strain. He improved this member of the lily family by continual reselection, much like present day exhibitors of pumpkins, Kelsae onions, runner beans etc do. The varieties around at that time are still there today, we would refer to them as heritage varieties; Conover’s Colossal, Mary Washington, and the French Argenteuil, but you can
do much better than these old varieties - by planting heavy cropping commercial varieties. Let others do the selecting process, saying that Kidner grew, sold and exhibited spears (he called them buds) of 1” in diameter calling them ‘Super Extra’ Selected buds. I can’t compete with that.
When I first set up home I had a very small asparagus bed at the back of the house, it wasn’t big enough and it wasn’t much of
a success, mainly because the soil was a present from the builder as was the under lying broken bricks and coke breeze blocks. Fast forward around thirty-five odd years to a casual comment from my wife ‘why don’t you try asparagus?’ this was in response to my building a raised bed on my one-acre plot to grow Champagne rhubarb for wine making. I had read that, this variety was the best, so on the strength of that and one
lot of rhubarb wine made with an unknown
2013. Mid April.
variety I made a super-duper raised bed out of concrete blocks. I grew the Champagne rhubarb from seed, it germinated, and I grew the seedlings on into plants and installed them in the new bed. These plantings were an amazing success, only one problem;
the ‘sticks’ were not pink or red they were a whitey/green and hairy,
years on and guess who is looking after this Queen of vegetables, or should I say King, as the Dutch variety Backlim being the one I chose is an all male variety.
In Kidner’s book much is made about planting distances, both between plants and
a sort of miniature cousin
to the Gunnera. I read later
that there are three strains
of Champagne rhubarb.
I was devastated by this catastrophe, as I now had a large expensive raised bed
full of very sour hairy useless green rhubarb. (I also grew some rhubarb from seed and
it is also green hairy and very tart, as well as being prone
to sending up flower stalks – Ed).
These plantings were an amazing success, only one problem; the ‘sticks’ were not pink or red...
between rows, he includes tables of planting distances in America. Asparagus has an amazing root system given the space, the larger the
root run the more spears per plant. I suppose that being captive in closely planted rows is far from ideal from the plants point of view. My Backlim took around eight
to ten years to throw up spears out of the rows, up to that time I could walk about
I struck a deal with my wife, it was agreed that I would plant it up with asparagus if she looked after it, what a mug. Around fifteen
and indeed hoe between the rows, now it
is a bit perilous – for the emerging spears. Most asparagus that is grown commercially is on light soil, if indeed it can often be described as soil, very often being sand. The advantages to this are, like carrots parsnips and leeks grown commercially on light land, the machinery can access the fields during wet periods without getting bogged down.
The medium in my bed certainly bucked the trend, mixing peat in with imported topsoil is/was okay at first but it quickly rots down and effectively disappears as does any manure mulch applied on top. Whilst on the subject of manure mulches, I covered the bed with a thick layer of bullock muck several years ago, just before cropping;
32 Simply Vegetables
2013. Mid April.
ADRIAN BAGGELEY