I guess I shouldn’t complain, I mean it is only May 12th after all. Our last expected frost date is still 3 days away. But would it have been too much to ask for just one year when we don’t get a late frost.
Anyway, we got the word today that we have a frost advisory tonight. Temperatures expected to be 35, close enough that I can’t take a chance, so the tomato plants all went under cover tonight.
A frost advisory this late in the season means cover up the plants and protect then in any way you can.
In the bed above I have 26 tomato plants. They have been in the ground for several weeks, and they were in the greenhouse many weeks before that. To lose them now would really be a bummer. So, I threw empty planters over 9 of them, and covered the other 15 with landscaping cloth. It isn’t going to take much to keep a light frost at bay. I hope it is a light frost at worst.
I have 9 more tomato plants in another garden, the one that gave me poison ivy already this season. So I had to cover those with landscape cloth too. That is 35 plants tucked in for the night. Glad I hadn’t put the rest of them or my pepper plants in yet.
The lettuce is getting close to a time when I can start pinching.
Other plants didn’t get covered. Here there are some lettuce and probably a sunflower seedling or two as well. There are lots of sunflowers just barely up that may not be able to take the frost, not sure about how hardy they are.
These purple beans are freshly up, they should be alright.
Hopefully this will be the end of it. Time to get some warm sun on these plants so they can grow up and bear great fruit.
Today was transplant day, the day when the weather is right to start moving things out of the greenhouse into the ground. I would like to share a photo essay of some of the things in my garden. You can click on the images below to get a view of a larger version of the image. You should do it, the large images hold lots of cool secret details you don’t see in the smaller versions.
Let’s start with the greenhouse. Because of the size and nature of my greenhouse, it is hard to get good pictures of the inside. I use a heavy plastic for the shell of the walls and root, and it allows light in, but it is not possible to take photos through it.
It is hard to get good pictures of the stuff growing in my greenhouse
This was the second year for my new greenhouse, and the plastic can’t be used for another year. It has rips in the high stress areas, and it is generally starting to deteriorate.
Here you can see where I have had to patch the plastic, and it continues to rip.
Checking the weather today, I saw that the lows at night for most of the rest of the 10 day forecast are in the 50s, daytime highs in the high 70s. There is also rain in the forecast, so that combination meant it was time to transplant the tomatoes into the garden.
I rolled back the plastic roof to get a glimpse inside, but left it attached so I could put the roof back in place if necessary.
The roof plastic has been rolled back to provide a glimpse inside.
What it showed me was a good view of some very healthy and happy plants, especially the tomatoes.
But before I started to transplant, I took the camera out and had a look around. I like to chronicle my garden, and frankly, you can get some pretty cool pictures of plants that are just starting to grow. I wanted to share some of those with you.
The first flowers that bloom in my garden are the dandelions. I am not sure how they got categorized as a weed, but the bees love them.
Click on the image above and take a close look at the larger version of the image. If you are able to free your mind from the judgement of the dandelion as a weed, you will see that it is really quite a beautiful flower. It becomes the first major food source for the bees in the spring, and that is good enough for me.
The raspberries are starting to bud out on last years canes, and producing new canes.
I wrote in one of my earlier blogs about the raspberries in my yard. Now they are starting to bud out with new growth on the old canes that will produce berries this spring, and new canes popping up that will provide berries in the fall.
Peas planted on St. Patrick’s day are up and have a good start.
Peas are one of my spring stalwarts. I like to plant them very early because they can handle a few freezes or snows and just keep on doing their thing. There have been some years when I have planted the peas right into the snow. Then, when they find soil they find the right time to germinate and are one of the earliest green things in the garden. I really like to look at the up close details of the pea plant.
Oregano is a perennial that does well in our climate. I have learned that it can be a challenge to keep it in control.
In addition to being an early herb to add to your sauces or salads, oregano is a lovely delicate little herb. It is surprising how much it can increase in size from year to year. This is my third year with this particular plant, and it has been transplanted to this location. Somehow it manages to have green even under the snow.
Onions show up all over my garden. If I have a place without something in it, it usually gets an onion seed.
Another early riser in the spring is the onion. Onions are the thing I plant the most of, placing either seeds or sets all over the garden. And yet, I always seem to run out of them. Luckily it is easy to keep the seeds of onions, so there is nothing to seeding the garden liberally with onions.
I was taking a picture of the lettuce, but I found a bunch of daisies.
The picture above is another one to take a closer look at. I was taking a picture of the lettuce coming up. I knew that there were a lot of little somethings coming up, but I didn’t know what they were. And then I opened this photo. I started a daisy patch because they are my wife’s favorite flower. Daisies are perennials, so they come back year after year, but it takes them a little while to get started. so this year I decided that in the back of the daisy patch I would grow lettuce and sunflowers. The sunflower seeds were just planted this weekend, but the lettuce is up. And now I realize that this will be the last year I will be able to plant lettuce here, because with all those daisies, there won’t be room for anything else next year.
Volunteer Blue Kale coming up.
In the picture above, you can see volunteer blue kale coming up from where the kale was planted last year. I like that the bolt is there for perspective. This is currently a little tiny plant. But, take a look at the larger picture and check out the details of the bolt, the water drops on kale, and the stone or wood deteriorating beside the bolt. That bolt used to hold a board onto cement blocks to provide a decorative edge.
Asparagus, it makes your pee stink, but it is so yummy.
The asparagus is well under way. It is the first edible thing that I get out of the garden each year. I planted these from seed about 5 years ago, and planted the seeds way too close together. I have been thinning the patch ever since. I thin one small section each fall and generally give away the roots, I have no more room for growing asparagus. If you are going to plant asparagus from seed, do yourself a favor and get the right spacing, it is a chore to thin them. I right about it in this blog post.
And since I have also posted about compost, I thought I would only be fitting to show the current status of my compost pile. It is very hot and active in there. The tarp give you an idea of the size of the pile, and it has reduced down to about a half or a third of the size it was at the beginning of spring. I have pulled some of the compost out today as I transplanted tomatoes, but it still has a ways to go before it is ready for using.
I added the tarp mostly to keep the moisture in the pile. As dry as it has been, the pile had started to dry out, and dry leaves don’t compost.
So, that is what the garden had to share before I started transplanting today. After I transplanted 35 plants of various types, I tilled up a new section to add to the garden. It was in the back corner and never had any light before. But last spring I lost three trees and it opened up a nice area that I can now garden. I added about 500 sq. ft. of garden this spring. I’ll be needing a lot of that compost to get it into shape, my soil consists mostly of sand until I amend it.
And just to close out the post, I wanted to share a cool photo I got after the storm came in and put a half inch of rain on my newly transplanted garden.
As I was preparing the images for this blog, my wife called me down to enjoy this, double rainbow all across the sky. This is the only decent image I got.
I’ve come to realize that this is a vanity blog. That means that I can write about anything I want, when I want. So tonight I am going to write about a garden crap bench I made for my wife.
Tina is a funny sort. She doesn’t care for gardening. But she likes all that crap that people put in their gardens. You know like the little statues and creatures and stuff like that. Garden Crap.
This is the spring ’15 layout of Brayden Garden
So, yesterday I decided to make her some garden crap. Mostly she likes stuff with rust and decaying wood and such. So I took some really old wood and put it together into a little bench.
This is the day, it must be the day, the day when we can truly hope that spring is here to stay. We can look forward to nice weather from now until next November. Last night I had a heater running in my greenhouse, I unplugged it this morning and don’t plan to plug it back in this season.
I had the greenhouse all buttoned up tight to try to keep the cold at bay for the last week. Today the sun came out in earnest and really started heating it up inside. Think about a car with the windows rolled all the way up. It heats up pretty nicely. On a cold day it is nice to sit inside on a cold sunny day, but on a warm sunny day it gets too hot too fast. That is kind of what my greenhouse is like when it is all buttoned up.
The today swung from 34 to 101 before I opened up the vents. Now it is hanging at 88, a nice green house temperature.
One of the things that you need to think about when you are designing a greenhouse is air circulation. In a low tech greenhouse like mine, that can be a challenge.
Strategically placed folds in plastic allow for strategic ventilation
I use strategically placed folds in the plastic that can either be propped open like in the image above, or held closed with wires and ties that are also seen in the image. There are vents placed to catch breezes from the north, south and west. We seldom get wind from the east on a warm sunny day, so it isn’t necessary to have vents on that side.
This view shows a closer view of the same vent.
In addition to venting out excess heat, this also allows for the introduction of breezes that will prepare the plants for the winds they will face when they are moved out into the garden.
This is the view I can only get from a camera. Looking toward the door from the back vent..
But until that day, they will have to be satisfied with sitting in a warm, sometimes hot, moist greenhouse. They like it like that.
For most people, the compost pile is not something worthy of a blog post. But for the true gardeners, there is an understanding that the compost pile is the heart of the garden.
At the most fundamental level, composting is easy. You throw a bunch of organic matter in a pile and leave it there to rot. But as you spend more time gardening, and seasons composting, you start to learn that there is composting and then there is composting. I am not going to go into the chemistry and process of composting. I have nothing to add that hasn’t been spoken about before.
But what I can do is share with you the evolution of my composting pile. When I first started out I decided to use a wire frame cylindrical frame. This was easy to set up and did a good job of containing the compost, but it was hard to mix, and the good stuff was down at the bottom out of reach. That combined with placing it in a shaded area meant I didn’t get the results I wanted as fast as I wanted. I needed more compost than I could produce, so I moved on.
This wire circle was my first compost pile. I made the mistake of putting it in the shaded corner of the yard where it didn’t get enough light to really heat up.
The next evolution of the compost pile found me out in a sunny area. I had learned about the three bin method, where you migrate the compost from one bin to the next as it aged. This process allows you to turn over the pile and aerate it as you move it from one bin to the next. And that is the way to keep your compost hot, make sure it gets plenty of air down in the composting materials. You also need to have the right combination of green and brown materials, but the real key is air and moisture.
The pallets were used to create a three bin compost pile.
This worked pretty well, but I still found myself needing more compost than I could produce in this way. So, I went to the next version, they straw bale enclosure.
The idea behind the straw bale compost is pretty easy. You use straw bales to build the container that the compost goes into. This provides a barrier that helps keep the heat in during the colder months so you can compost when other methods would have shut down. Along the way, the straw bales start to compost themselves and provide additional carbon materials (brown) to the compost pile. I would cover it with a black tarp to trap in the heat and keep out excess water, and I would hold the plastic down with, you guessed it, old pallets.
This shows how the pile covered in plastic.
I got a couple of years out of the straw bales, but they eventually broke down into compost. The image below shows it the second and last year that I used straw bales. That year I decided that I still needed more compost than I was producing. That fall, after watching truck after truck drive by bringing leaves to the dump, I decided that it was silly for them to drive by my house on the way when I could use them for my compost. So, I invited a few of the neighbors to bring me their leaves and I ended up with a much bigger compost pile, and a tradition that continues today.
The straw bales break down and the pile becomes less contained.
I now had a reasonable amount of compost, and it allowed me to leave some there during the year. And what I found out, is that during the summer, the location that normally holds the compost pile, really want things to grow. So I have experimented with things like potatoes, and squash, pumpkins and tomatoes, and really anything that wants to grow there. At the very least, it will become next year’s compost.
For some reason, things want to grow in my compost pile.Another view of the compost pile in relation to the rest of the garden
This last fall I went all the way and put up a sign that said “taking leaves” beside the road inviting the entire neighborhood to bring in their leaves. And several did. I ended up with a very large compost pile. It is big enough now that it takes up the whole area behind the white fence, and is about 5 feet deep in the fall, and about 3 1/2 feet deep in the spring. Then a couple of weeks ago I had a friend call and ask if they could bring in their leaves, grass clippings and pine needles to throw on my pile. “Well yeah!”
So now I have this really massive compost pile. It is a bit of work to turn it over, but I do that to keep it composting hot. Last Sunday I reached my hand into the middle of the pile and it was HOT! That is exactly what you want.
The pile at the beginning of spring, and before a friend brought in another truck load of stuff.
I think this year I may have enough compost. It still has some rotting to do, but another 4 weeks and it should be mostly ready to spread. And my garden is going to love it.
It is hard to believe that it has been almost 29 years since my grandfather died. Fritz and I were buddies. He was that special adult in my life that had a significant influence on me, and has always held a special place in my heart. And, for as long as I can remember, he had one of these tractors out in the yard. I don’t remember him ever actually touching it, but for some reason it is firmly tied to my memory of him.
I have been waiting 29 years to get one of these.
There weren’t many toys at my grandparent’s house. A couple of old toy tractors, mini bikes, riding lawn mowers, real tractors, and guns were the things we had to entertain ourselves. Oh, and of course the millions of things that you find on a farm in West Texas. But, for whatever reason I just loved that tractor sprinkler.
This picture shows most of the mechanism that makes this thing work.
The engineering behind this is quite brilliant. Technically I think it is referred to as a walking sprinkler. The intended function is to move forward as it waters the lawn/garden. It is designed to follow the hose, with the front tire being designed to fit over the hose. The water hose is connected to the tractor and turned on. The water flows out through the swing arms and forces an inclined plane to rotate. That is interconnected with a gear that us turned by the rotation of the inclined plane. Attached to the gear are two arms, each extending to a swinging metal tooth. The tooth is designed such that as it moves forward in the rotation the tooth pushes another gear, which is the tractor’s tire causing it to turn and propel the tractor forward. As the tooth swings back, it freely flops over the teeth of the wheel gear and repeats the cycle again for the next rotation. You can create a path with the hose and it will follow that path until it bumps into something, dragging the hose behind it as it goes. I watched it do this for hours as a kid.
When Fritz died in the late summer of 1986, that tractor became a part of my memory of him, and I always wanted one ever since. They still manufacture versions of the tractor sprinkler, but they aren’t that old fashioned sturdy kind. They aren’t Fritz’s tractor. I had seen a few of the vintage ones over the years, but they were either too expensive or I just didn’t have the ability to get them at the time. But this spring I was at a construction material reclamation business looking for doors (that is another blog story for someday in the future), when I saw it.
This one was cast iron, just the way it should be. It was used, but not abused, and it still worked. I haven’t run any water through it yet, but the swing arms turn and all the mechanisms follow suit accordingly. And after all of these years, I finally have my tractor sprinkler.
This is the spring ’15 layout of Brayden Garden
I have given it a place in Brayden Garden. Brayden Garden is a memorial garden that I built after the death of my nephew. He was 5 years old and he died of the flu and meningitis within hours of first showing symptoms. It has become a place of grounding for me. I always find myself reflecting on the fragility of life when I am working that garden.
This cherub was donated the day after a neighbor learned of Brayden’s death.
The artifacts in the garden are growing in number. The first thing that went in was a cherub statuette that was given to me after my neighbor heard the story. I watched her heart break right in front of my eyes when I told her about Brayden. The next day, she brought me the cherub while I was out working on the garden.
The Tonka was Brayden’s
The next thing added to the garden was Brayden’s Tonka Truck. This truck was bought by my brother the day Brayden was born and it sat in the hospital room with a bouquet of flowers. The next time I saw that truck with a bunch of flowers in it was at his funeral. My brother James and his wife Melissa gave us the truck when they found out we had created the memorial garden and wanted some toy of his to go into the garden. Every year I plant flowers in it and it sits out in the garden.
Other things have been added to Brayden Garden over the few years it has been, but none with the significance of those two. Anyway, when I got this tractor, it was a bit of a memorial to Fritz, so it was obvious that it needed to be added to the garden.
Now I can guarantee you, that there is going to be a time when I put that tractor to work doing what it is supposed to do, but in the mean time it gets to sit there in Brayden Garden. And there, it will serve as one of those things that bring me back to another time and place, gives me access to memories that I otherwise might forget while at the same time helping me to stay grounded in the present.
If you look around my garden, you are going to see re-purposed materials. Pallets and windows, old deck boards and paving stones, it is all likely to have a home in my garden eventually.
Yesterday I showed you my new cold frame made from old house windows and reused deck joists. Today I want to give you a glimpse at some of the things in my garden that are made of recycled materials.
Solar dehydrator built from salvaged shower doors, salvaged windows and pallets.
This solar dehydrator is the most sophisticated of the stuff I have built for my garden. The walls are made out of old shower doors that came out of our house. The frames on the walls are made from pallet wood as is the frame of the solar collector (the part that juts out in the front). The glass on the solar collector is from old windows, but I can’t remember where they came from. The 4x4s that hold it up were gathered from the free wood bin at the outlet store for a local hardware store. In this case I did actually buy some materials but normally I don’t. I bought the plywood and the sheet metal that is used to gather the heat in the collector. I also bought screen material to cover the racks on the inside, but the racks themselves are made out of old pallet wood.
This view shows the solar dehydrator at work
I took it even a step further, and after a couple of years of using it only as a solar dehydrator I decided I could take off the solar collector in the spring and use it as a greenhouse. I think I used it as a greenhouse for two seasons. I painted some large stones black and put them down in the bottom so they could gather heat from the sun during the day and slowly release it at night to keep it warm. It worked great.
The same structures that allow for dehydrating vegetables can be adapted to hold trays of seedlings.
On really cold nights, I had a small heater fan on a thermostat that I kept down at the bottom with the large rocks, and it would only come on when it was really starting to get chilly. It works great as both a solar dehydrator and as a greenhouse.
But I found that I needed more space in my greenhouse, so I built a greenhouse out of pallets. The greenhouse actually started out to be an ice shack, but it never made it there. I had found a very large heavy duty pallet and salvaged it with the idea of using it as the base of the ice shack. I had used re-purposed 4x4s and attached them as skids or skis to the base of the pallet. I figured this would allow me to move it around better on the ice and would give it enough substance to drag around without fear of tearing up the pallet when dragging it behind the truck. But I never got the sides on it before my back went out on Christmas Day 2013 and stopped those plans.
Before adding the plastic sheeting, you can see the simple structure made from pallet wood. the floor is also a large pallet.
It sat in my shed until that spring when I decided I needed a greenhouse more than I needed an ice shack. So I figured out how to put up walls made out of pallets, and then tried to figure out how to add a roof without making it too heavy. To that end, I found some old PVC pipes that had been part of the set of “The Jungle Book” put on by Red Cedar Youth Stage (local children’s youth theater). It seemed like a shame to see them thrown away when there was bound to be a need for them someday.
Here you can see how the pallets were used for the sides and internal shelving. The only structural elements not made of pallets are the ceiling joists which are made from re-purposed PVC pipe.
Add some shelving made out of pallets and some purchased sheet plastic and you have a greenhouse for not much more than the cost of the screws and plastic sheeting. The heat collecting mechanism in here is a combination of those black rocks from the other greenhouse, and, you guessed it, a re-purposed basketball hoop base. The base is black, and it holds about 40 gallons of water. It gathers that heat in the day and lets it out all night.
The pallets were used to create a three bin compost pile.
One of these days, I will do a story on composting. But for now I will just touch base with how you can use pallets to create a three bin compost system. In the picture below you can see how a handful of pallets can be used to manage your compost pile. The idea is that you fill up the first bin, then when it gets full, you move it into the next bin, and ultimately the last. This allows you to contain the compost, and each time you move it to the next bin you stir it up and your finished compost is in the last bin. Ultimately my compost pile way outgrew this system so it is no longer in use.
If you know me, you know that I am a form follows function kind of guy. I build something for the job it needs to do. But sometimes, the function is aesthetic. The picture below shows a trellis, no let’s call it a garden sculpture that I made out of pallets.
Behind the lattice work you can see the original pallet that serves as the frame.
In this case, I needed a structure to support the growth of my clematis. This was going to be a high visibility structure, so it needed to look like something other than a pallet. So I got creative.
Clematis enjoying the sun and shade provided by this recycled pallet.
If you look around my place, you cannot help but see things that used to be other things. I use them all over the place. I like to think that every time I reuse a pallet, or a window, or a whatever, that is one less thing to go into the landfill. It is also money I don’t have to spend, and I like that.
I hope you enjoy my ideas, and I hope they inspire you to do something with pallets. But, stay away from my pallet source, I have some more ideas for this spring.
Every year I add something new to my garden. It might be a new fence, a greenhouse, or even a new garden. I don’t dedicate a lot of budget to the garden so normally it is made of something that had previously been something else.
This year my new addition is a cold frame.
My cold frame is made of recycled windows and deck boards.
What exactly is a cold frame? Basically, it is a structure that is normally placed on the ground and is built in such a way as to capture the heat from the sun to extend the growing season.
This year I was fortunate enough to not have snow on the ground in early April and it gave me a chance to clean up the garden and start thinking about growing outdoors. Now I have lived in Wisconsin for 7 years, which is plenty long enough to know that there is still ice under the soil and there will probably be snow on top of it again.
So what a cold frame does is give us a chance to get some of those cold weather plants started just a little bit earlier than normal. After my lettuce, radishes and onions get started in here, I will probably move it to another part of the garden to give some of the warmer weather crops a couple of extra growing weeks as well. It is a way of fighting off those nights that just flirt below freezing with just enough captured heat to make the difference. It causes the soil to heat up quicker too, and the roots like that.
A couple of years ago my greenhouse full of tomatoes was buried in 16 inches of snow on May 2.
So now, let’s go back to my cold frame. A couple of years ago a friend at work was remodeling a house and he had a bunch of old windows that needed a new home. Naturally Pete thought of me and I became the new owner of 8 old windows. I brought them home and added them to my pile of stuff waiting for a reason to be used. With my love of gardening and a bunch of old windows, I knew it was just a matter of time before they got re-purposed.
I put these out about a week or so ago. I used recycled 2 x 12 boards from an old deck to build the frame and placed them around a part of my garden where I had scattered some lettuce and radish seeds, a few onions and I can’t remember if there is anything else. I put the windows on top, just laid them there, nothing fancy. When the rains were forecast for this week, I decided it would be easier to let mother nature do the watering, so I took them off and leaned them against the frame from the outside. And it rained and watered my seeds. Just the way it is supposed to be.
Now today, I saw the forecast and it is calling for 2-4″ of snow. It was the last thing we needed, but it had to be expected. That is where my cold frame comes in. I went out there today to put the windows back up on my cold frame so the snow doesn’t fall and chill the ground. When I went out there, do you want to guess what I saw?
That is right, the radishes were poking there noses through the soil. It probably wouldn’t have hurt those radishes to get a little snow on their noses, but just think about how happy they are going to be when they are tucked in all cozy like into their cold frame instead of lying there in the snow. It will probably buy them 5 or 10 degrees and when the snow is gone I will be 4 or 5 days ahead.
Sounds like a plan, let’s see if it works. I’ll tell you more about how I use reused materials around my garden another day, maybe tomorrow.
Enjoy your gardening folks, and don’t be afraid to take something old and make it something new in your garden.
So your asparagus patch is over crowded. You can take that little patch of overcrowded asparagus and convert it into a very large patch of asparagus by digging up and separating that root ball.
Asparagus is one of the first harvests you will get from your garden.
If your asparagus isn’t above ground yet, it is your last chance to transplant. Asparagus needs space to get the nutrients necessary to produce the large sprigs we love to eat. If you plant from seed, or your asparagus is given the chance to produce seeds, it will eventually get over crowded.
When packed too tightly, Asparagus can’t get enough nutrients to grow well. They need to be broken up and transplanted.
This clump was dug up last winter after it had gone dormant. You can see the yellow asparagus and an assortment of green weeds. Your asparagus should be dormant when you are trying to transplant it. Dig it up and remove all the debris. This is a hands on job and it is easier if you get the root ball as clean as possible.
There will be dozens of asparagus crowns in this ball
It is important to get as much of the soil off the roots as you can. It holds the roots together, so it is best to take a hose to it and get as much of the soil out of the root ball as you can.
It is a exercise in patience to separate crowns from a root ball, but it is worth the effort.
When you get it cleaned up, it is going to look something like this. This particular root ball is a result of planting from seeds placed too closely together. There are dozens of crowns in this root ball.
The key is to learn to identify each crown so you can isolate it from the others and pull it apart from the ball. It really is as simple as that, but it can be a challenge. You can identify the individual crowns by following a root to the place where it ends, and look to see that there are other roots coming from other directions and ending in the same spot. This point is your crown. Be careful with that part, it contains the stuff that will turn into next year’s spears.
Learning to follow the roots to the individual crowns is the key to separating out the crowns.
After you pull them apart, you will have a group of root clusters, each of which will become it’s own asparagus plant when transplanted. You will need to dig a trench about 5 or 6 inches deep, and wide enough to place the crowns in with the roots out flat. At the bottom of the trench put the richest soil you can find, you will be feeding these plants for a long time. Place the roots in the trench, and cover it with about 3 inches of soil. As the season goes on, you will add more fertile compost or soil until it reaches level ground.
After you separate them out, a clump will give you dozens of crowns to plant into a new patch.
When you will be able to harvest depends upon how old your crowns are, and how much they like where you plant them. Usually you can count on not getting a harvest the first year unless you are planting really nice crowns. You can harvest the asparagus spears when they are about the size of a pencil or larger. If they are smaller than that you should leave them to supply nutrients for next year.
Planted from seed, still too young to harvest.
The first year they will be thin and spindly, in subsequent years they will get more and more stout. Your biggest job for the first year will be to keep the weeds out of the garden so they don’t compete with the asparagus. Top dress with good compost to keep the weeds down and the nutrients up.
Cilantro and Asparagus growing together in the garden.
After it is established, you can use the space between the asparagus for some other crops if you leave enough room between asparagus plants. In this picture I have cilantro that works nicely because later in the spring and summer it benefits from the shade provided by the asparagus. Also, it is really easy to pull up cilantro and clean our the patch when it is done. I have heard of people planting strawberries and even tomatoes between the asparagus rows.
The Damselfly will eat a lot of the pests that will settle on your asparagus, but you still have to pick the beetles.
I don’t like to use insecticides or herbicides in my garden if it can be avoided. That means I have to go through and pick of the asparagus beetles most mornings. Later in the season, the damselflies and wasps come through and take care of a lot of the bugs that will infect your garden.
I also go through and pull off the springs that start forming seeds, because the seeds of asparagus become small asparagus plants that act like weeds because they compete with the older plants for space.
Once you have them established, take care of your plants, by feeding them and clearing out the debris. The will then feed you and your family and make your pee smell of asparagus for 30 to 50 years.
