Not much to update y’all on this week as I’m working all hours at my laptop and Rob is working all hours on the summer kitchen. Except…
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Literally the most exciting thing to happen all week. Possibly ever. |
…our first ever proper asparagus harvest!!!
Because we grew our asparagus from seed, it’s taken a fucking ice age to get to the point where we can harvest normal amounts. By ‘ice age’ I mean four years. FOUR YEARS! Four years we’ve waited to pick enough spears to make a whole meal. Four. Years.
If you buy two-year-old crowns, I think you can pretty much start harvesting normally the following year, but we’ve never seen asparagus crowns for sale here. Thankfully, asparagus is really easy to grow from seed. In fact, so many of our seeds germinated and grew into crowns (which look a bit like white, spindly spiders), we ended up giving several crowns away to friends.
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Asparagus crown or alien? You decide. |
That was the only downside to growing from seed: we ended up with a really congested bed, with crowns bunched up far too close together, so we had to dig them up two years ago and respace everything (giving the surplus crowns away). We were so worried about exhausting the crowns after we’d moved them around, we only picked about two spears last year. There’s just no hurrying asparagus.
But this year, this year, it’s full steam ahead and we managed to pick a magnificent 14 spears in one go on Sunday. What extravagant feast did we make with this bounty? Erm, asparagus dipped in soft-boiled eggs. It was much nicer than it sounds.
In other Gardening Bore news, we’ve pricked out our tomato seedlings, sown a few more flower seeds, and generally filled our bedroom (which has two sunny windows and is a cat-free zone) with seedlings.
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I have walked into this table oh so many times in the middle of the night. |
But, mainly, asparagus.
I want to buy a polytunnel and grow asparagus too! But what about the winter? Don't you have to protect it from the cold and cover over the asparagus plants with straw or leaves or something?
Nope, we do nothing to protect ours. They're grown outside, not under cover, and we do nothing in the winter apart from cut the yellow ferns down. Ours seem pretty happy with almost zero interference. My kind of crop!