That Time We Moved the Asparagus Bed

Last spring, we rebuilt half of the garden by taking out the old wooden raised beds and replacing them with metal ones. This spring, we replaced the other half. I'll be posting about that soon. Moving the tons of dirt from the old beds into the new ones was a lot of work, but the real chore, in my opinion, was digging out the asparagus bed. 

The "old" asparagus bed behind the Three Sisters bed.

Back in March, I tried to get the process started by digging up the asparagus while it was still dormant. At that time, I found that the ground was still frozen, so I couldn't do any digging. At least, that's what I thought. The ground certain still had some ice in it, but when I went back to try again after it had warmed up considerably, I still found it very hard to dig. 

Over the winter, I had researched how to relocate an asparagus bed. I read that it was a delicate process to remove the fragile roots and crowns and that I needed to be gentle with them. With that in mind, I carefully began the extraction. The gentle approach got me nowhere. I could barely get the tines of my garden fork into the earth. So, I got out a shovel and began to tentative probe the soil to loosen it around roots. When my husband found me jumping on the shovel like a pogo stick he suggested getting out an ax. I chuckled and allowed him to take over for a bit. Finally, he was able to remove an asparagus crown.

You've heard of the Flying Spaghetti Monster...

One of the first things we planted in our brand-new garden some 10 years was the asparagus bed. I guess after that long, the tiny, delicate asparagus crowns had turned to hulking beasts. That would explain the difficulty digging and maybe why some of the asparagus spears last year were somewhat malformed. I assumed that had been insects but it might have been the result of intense overcrowding.

It ended up taking more than a month to fully remove all the asparagus from the old bed. I strained by back while working on it and my husband's attention was on moving soil to the new beds. By the time we had hauled all the bits of asparagus out of its 1-foot by 11-foot bed, I was, frankly, tired of it.

One of the newer 3'x6' beds temporarily held all the dug-up asparagus.

For a couple days, I considered just dumping the load at the back of our property and letting it fend for itself. But then I noticed the tiny green spears reaching out of the mass of twisted roots.

Life will find a way.

I couldn't just exile the asparagus when it was doing its best to keep going. So, I went to work digging a new, larger bed outside of the garden proper. The digging started out easily enough. Removing the first layer of turf was actually kind of fun. Then I got into the rocks. There were so many rocks. I have vowed that the next place we live will have soil free of rocks. By the time I get over the last move, however, and actually want to move again, I'll likely be too old to dig a hole anyway. 

That's going to have to be good enough.

After heaving the dug-up asparagus "crowns" over the garden fence rather than carrying them all the way out through the gate, I laid them into the hole. I probably should have used fewer of them or made a larger bed but I didn't have the heart or the energy to do either. 

Sorry, they're just going to have to figure it out.

I had to shake out the turf in order to recover enough soil to completely cover the asparagus in its new home but it all seemed to work out.

All done!

Now, almost a month later, the asparagus has put up new spears. There aren't a lot but it proves that at least some of them survived the violent, haphazard transplanting. 

Hey, maybe this will actually work!

You may notice in the photo that many of the spears appear to be broken off. They were bitten off, more likely. I didn't think that deer ate asparagus, but they do seem to like to sample nearly everything we try to grow around here. I've just decided to shrug and late nature take its course.

Was it only the fence keeping the deer from devastating our asparagus crop?

Back in the Garden Again

The 2016 gardening season is in full swing now. Nearly everything is planted in the garden and we’ve already been able to pick some things. It is wonderful to be in the second year of a garden. The chives were up and ready to use by the middle of April and on the 25^th of that month we had our first asparagus. We made a rhubarb pie on May 7^th. We had to supplement the fresh rhubarb with some frozen from last year to fill the crust but it tasted very good. The strawberries are coming back strong as well.

Garden at rest in mid-April

Home-grown asparagus - yum!

As usual, I spent much of late winter/early spring poring over seed catalogs and working out my garden layout. After the fungus on the chard and beets last year I had to make sure I rotated things around this year. That’s just good practice anyway, but it did lead to a lot of erasing on my plan. I thought I had it all set when I realized I had put the tomatoes where the potatoes were last year and that’s a no no. So, I had to make some changes but finally got everything worked out.

Potatoes starting to peek through

I put the first seeds in the ground on April 29 – scallions, beets and arugula. At the beginning of May we put in the potatoes, carrots, pak choi, chard, snap peas and garden peas. Since then we have been battling squirrels who think their nuts are still stashed in the garden from last winter. In all fairness, I have pulled out two acorns that were on their way to turning into oak trees so the squirrels are not entirely wrong.

An oak tree in the garden? I don't think so.

Nearly every day there were new little drill holes in the raised beds. I wouldn’t mind the digging so much if it didn’t disturb the new seedlings. The only seeds the tree rats seem to actually be digging up and eating are the snap peas which have been entirely cleaned out. All the other plants are just collateral damage of the digging. I tried dusting everything with cayenne pepper but that seemed to have no effect. I probably didn’t use enough. One container got spread over the entire garden. I have some other pepper-based repellent on the way from Amazon so we’ll see how that works.

The Enemy

The strawberry bed seems to be a favorite place for the squirrel digging. Again, they have not damage the plants, they are just digging everywhere among them. I worried that when the strawberries actually did come on that the squirrels would finally turn their attention to the berries. After waiting over a year for the fruit myself, I am not about to give them up to the squirrels or the chipmunks or the birds, for that matter. So, I got some bird netting and made a little cage over the plants. I got that done a few days ago and so far so good. (fingers crossed)

Protecting the strawberries

I just got the rest of the seeds in the ground yesterday. The list is similar to last year – corn, pumpkins, beans, cucumbers, summer squashes, acorn squash. I gave up on some vegetables I planted last year like kale, turnips and spinach and have added watermelon radishes to the mix. I started several plants indoors earlier in the spring but I forgot to start hardening them off until yesterday morning so I’m not ready to plant them out yet. I’ll write more about starting the seeds in my next post.

View of the garden on May 28

My husband asked me the other day if it actually saved any money growing produce ourselves or if it was cheaper to just buy vegetables at the grocery store. My first thought was that it must be less expensive at the store, especially if you figure in the time we put in to keep the garden running. Of course that’s one of my favorite parts of gardening so I hesitate to consider that an expense. So, I decided to run some numbers. This year, we spent $23.89 on seeds and $55.77 to amend the soil. We also spent $374.87 for everything needed to start seeds indoors. That’s a grand total $454.53 (so far). Will the garden produce that much store-quality veg? I don’t know. If it does, great. If not, well, at least I had a great time playing in the dirt!

Pak choi seedling

Strawberry blossoms

Arugula before thinning

Chive blossoms

Garden pea seedling