YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK
The USDA has a really useful engine website up on essentially all of the plants that grow in the US. Included in the searchable database are thousands of photos.
I’m thinking about putting in an asparagus bed, as Lydia and I are both addicts. If anyone has any hints & tips about growing these, particularly in the South, please drop a comment.
3 Responses to “YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK”
![]() Comment by StarGirl October 20th, 2007 at 10:53 pm |
I have grown asparagus in the north. It was wildly successful with very little care. I tilled the soil first – worth doing up front as the plants will be there for years to come. I put down that black “rain gets through but weeds don’t” fabric first, which helped a lot. I had to tear slightly larger holes for the plants each year, but that was no problem. The plants get pretty big, so you need a lot of “spillover” space – mine hung over the edge of the bed. I edged the bed with chives. The wonderful thing about both asparagus and chives is that they come back year after year in early spring, just when you’re thinking “maybe I won’t bother with a garden this year”. But there they are, already growing (the asparagus can grow an inch or two in a *day*), ready to harvest, enticing you once again into planting all kinds of other things. |
![]() Comment by speedwell October 20th, 2007 at 11:56 pm |
One of the engineers I used to work for (in Houston) tried growing an asparagus bed one year, failed to get anything much, and let it overgrow itself. The next year he was clearing out the tall grass that had grown up in the asparagus bed, and started finding two-to-three-foot asparagus growing all by itself. He brought a few stalks of it to work and we niked them with some butter and they were amazing. We called it his “passive-agressive asparagus” for most of the next year. 🙂 OK, that wasn’t much help, but it amused us. |
![]() Comment by speedwell October 20th, 2007 at 11:57 pm |
niked = nuked. Microwaved. And I can too spell “aggressive.” |