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Our asparagus is planted, we've covered
them up, and now we need to think about how we're going to care for them during the first
several years. What we're interested in doing is having the plants become well established,
so we want to make sure we give them plenty of water. Asparagus is going to need about
one inch of water per week, so if it rains, fine. If it doesn't rain, you need to get
out there and irrigate them.\ We also want to keep all the weeds down. As
I said before, asparagus is not a very good competitor of weeds, so we want to keep this
area clean cultivated, at least for the first several years.\
One of the things we can do to help control weeds, and to help retain moisture in the
soil, is we can use some sort of mulch. We can use straw mulch, we can use sawdust, different
things like that, but you want to consider that what you use could impact any of your
subsequent weed control strategies.\ If you are going to mulch with an organic
mulch, straw mulch would be the preferred thing to use to keep the weeds down.\
Typically, we're going to wait to mulch until the spears start to emerge, especially in
a newly planted asparagus, but if you put your mulch layer down thinly, we can go ahead
and mulch at the beginning of the year, right after planting, and just continue to add some
more straw as we get more and more spears to emerge.\
We're going to place the straw fairly loosely, and not very deep, right over the bed. This
will serve as an effective weed barrier and help hold moisture in around those crowns.\
With asparagus, we're interested in expanding the size of that crown, so we're not going
to harvest in the first year that we plant the crowns. The second year, we're not going
to harvest any spears at all, because we want the energy, the photosynthesis from those
ferns, going back in to produce a larger crown.\ In the third year after planting is when we
can begin to harvest, and in that year, we can harvest for 7 to 10 days, and what you
want to do is cut every spear that's coming up during that 7 to 10 day period. In the
second harvest year, we can harvest for two weeks. In the third harvest year, we can harvest
for three weeks, until we get up to about four to five weeks of harvest.\
Growing asparagus in Maine is becoming more and more popular. Asparagus is one of the
earliest vegetables we have to harvest out of our garden. Typically, harvest of asparagus
is going to begin in the early part of May. If you're in the southern part of the state,
or a warmer location, you might even be able to begin harvesting asparagus towards the
end of April.}