Grant Douglas's Garden Diary

Week 25: Fourth week of June

Saw the first prunus blossom out the other day, yahoo!

Someone once told me that if your horse died, you should see it as a good opportunity to feed a new asparagus bed. Now is the time to be putting Asparagus beds in - plants should become available soon. It is worth going to the trouble of good preparation as a bed can last 20 years or more.

The important preparation is good drainage, heavy feeding (hence the horse) of manures and composts and the removal of any perennial weeds which may become mixed up in the Asparagus plants. Do not lime the ground as Aparagus prefers an acid soil, but it does like a good dollop of seaweed. Raised beds are ideal as it gives you that extra depth of quality soil and drainage. If you are making timber raised beds, try to avoid tanalised timber and use something like macrocarpa lined with a heavy plastic. Ideally beds should be 1.5 metres wide which means that picking and bed tidying can be done mostly without having to go on to the beds.

There are a number of varieties of Asparagus available including purple ones. Mary Washington is an old favourite and many of the new varieties are simply known as a number. Crowns should be planted fairly deep below the surface (100 to 150 mm) with a 50mm gap between the top of the dormant shoot and the surface. Plants are in rows 50cm apart and 30 - 40cm apart within the rows. Three rows, 5m long will give a good supply for the average household.

The crowns you plant will be one year old and in their second year you should not cut anything off them at all when they shoot in the spring. In the third year you can cut for approximately one month and every year after that for approximately 2 months. In the Autumn the ferns are cut down before they drop berries, and a Winter mulch of compost, blood and bone (bone dust is excellent) and seaweed is a good maintenance programme.

There is some disagreement as to whether it is beneficial, but a lot of people put a light dressing of sea-salt over the bed in the Winter. The other option to crowns, is to sow your own seed in a seedling bed to produce your own crowns a year later. The main advantage of this is that you can choose the male plants, which tend to be vigorous and of course don't drop berries to seed everywhere, and it's cheaper.

Dont forget that with the weather so wet, if you can't get in to sow such things as Broad Beans and to plant Garlic; they can be done now in punnets, to be planted out when the ground dries. The same is true for Red Onions, although they do do better, grown as seedlings in the open ground.

Sowing or Planting this week:
Tomatos, Peppers, Chillie's - see last week's column.
Broad Beans (I am trying a new variety for me this year called Imperial Green, where the beans stay green, even after cooking)
Garlic
Lettuce (Loose-leaf Fancy and Triumph Hearting - not outside now, but in containers, in a protected place e.g. Greenhouse, veranda)
Red Onions - protect soil surface from heavy rains (Heard the other day about the use of carpet underfelt - sounds like good idea. Just get it off as soon as germination takes place)
Shallots
Spinach (winter varieties eg. Hybrid No.7) - not outside now, but in containers as above

Sow Direct: (in containers, protected as above)
Corn Salad
Mescalin Mix
Rocket

Preparation of beds for Strawberries and Asparagus.

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