Quantity is nice, but when home grown it comes second to producing high quality food. Asparagus surviving the heat and dry. For a home grower with a small number of plants who is growing for personal consumption rather than profit, this news is not so gloomy. In the long term they either need to remove all the berries, or carefully dig up and transplant the seedlings, otherwise the bed gets choked and only thin spears are produced.
So this extra work actually becomes a positive. According to the literature above, female plants often produce longer, fatter spears of higher quality. These are exactly the traits that I want when growing asparagus! If you are growing food at home you may as well grow the best. I am not growing asparagus to sell the spears, I am growing to eat them. So if the choice I have to make is either more spears that are thin and low quality, or less spears if they are fatter and of superior quality, I will choose the latter every time.
Asparagus growing between QLD arrowroot. Personally my plants are all seed grown and I just grow whatever. I have a mix of male plants and female plants and I normally remove the berries.
I have grown asparagus from seed, it takes a lot of time and effort so most people prefer to buy dormant crowns. Now that I know more about the quality of female asparagus plants, and why we are told to remove female asparagus plants, I plan to get some seeds of a few heirloom varieties to grow them out and offer year old crowns for sale. Keep an eye on my for sale page from next winter and I will try to have a few crowns of heirloom asparagus varieties for sale.
Labels: Perennial vegetables. Location: Australia. Anonymous 13 June at Damo 13 June at Becky 20 June at Newer Post Older Post Home. Subscribe to: Post Comments Atom. The garden would be rather crowded. Hi Lesley, Congrats on your asparagus seedlings — they look great! Sounds like a fun gardening project. If you plant your transplants now, they may or may not produce seed this year. You may be able to recognize them as male or female this year, or you may have to wait until next year.
I read about a research experiment that used DNA extraction to determine asparagus gender from young seedlings , but apparently in the seed form the plant gender is still quite hidden. In my book, asparagus Asparagus officinalis is king of the edible perennial garden. Spearhead an All-Male Bed Some gardeners swear by store-bought all-male asparagus crowns for planting, while others love starting plants from seed, and saving their own seeds to grow yet more plants.
If you want to save your own seed, having both male and female asparagus plants is a necessity. Facebook 69 Twitter Pinterest More Posts Notify of. Oldest Newest Most Voted. Inline Feedbacks. Reply to Carrie Peterson 1 year ago. Reply to John Notte 1 year ago. Hi John! Glad you found the article helpful.
So if you need to protect them in any way to keep them doing their job, then, you might want to! Hope this helps! Allison Sidhu allison-sidhu. Reply to Heather Rowan 1 year ago. Spearhead tightness, an important external quality indicator, was significantly better in female plants than males.
From these results, we concluded that in spring, the spear yield and quality of female plants would be better than those of male plants without causing a difference in the annual yield. Therefore, a choice of all-male varieties seems to be not necessary and all female cultivation could be profitable for protected mother fern culture in Japan, since the price of spears in spring and heavier spears is higher in the Japanese asparagus market.
Citation Watanabe, S. Her work has appeared in health, medical and scientific publications such as Endocrinology and Journal of Cell Biology. She has also published in hobbyist offerings such as The Hobstarand The Bagpiper. Marie is a certified master gardener and has a Ph.
Home Guides Garden Gardening. By Joanne Marie. Related Articles. A Larger Yield Although both male and female asparagus plants can produces flowers, only the female plant produces fruit, which are small red berries that you'll see clinging to asparagus ferns in the summer. Other Benefits Asparagus plants are perennials that usually live about 20 years, but male plants tend to live longer that female plants, probably because they expend less energy and use less stored nutrients during their life span.
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