Planting Asparagus (currently in pots, grown from seed)

I've had a trawl of the forums and I have also seen a really interesting video (sorry lost the URL now) of the planting of a "crown" - but it looked more like a large plug plant to me ...

... my plants were grown from seed last year, are now in 6" pots, and already sprouting anything up to half a dozen spears each.

The advice I had read is to make a mound and spread out the roots. That's fine, the bed is all prepared and ready for planting.

However, I think I'm going to disturb the roots a lot doing this - rather than just knocking them out of the pots into planting holes. So I just wanted to check that I should indeed spread out the roots.

Any other planting tips and advice would be welcome - I'm keen to do it the best possible way

I just read from Joy Larkcom that seed-grown asparagus should be grown on the flat, eg no need for the mounding as with the crowns

Good luck with them. I am going to grow from seed as well. Can't wait 

Thanks Corynsboy, that all makes sense. I'll see what they look like when I get them out of the pots and then decide

Good luck with them. I am going to grow from seed as well. Can't wait 

Good luck to you to! I wish all mine had been F1 seed, some are some aren't - and I expect I will get some female seed-sowing plants ... hadn't thought about that.

I grew mine on in the greenhouse until July or so, which I think brought them on well.

Mine were sown on 01-Apr, took about 14 days to germinate, and were potted up on 10th May. Here's a picture from 15th June

Corynsboy:

I forgot to say "wonderful website". Its bookmarked and I'll be reading some of your adventures this afternoon.

Corynsboy:

I forgot to say "wonderful website". Its bookmarked and I'll be reading some of your adventures this afternoon.

You are very kind.  Thanks for reading Irene.  I try and keep it simple and cheery.  Lots of pictures. 

All planted

I had dug a trench and [well rotted] manured it. That meant that planting depth wasn't going to be quite as deep as I wanted - I wanted to allow finished level, once I had pushed the earth back, to be a couple of inches lower than top-of-pot depth.

So I scraped some manure sideways at each planting station, placed a double-handful of sharp sand and made a bit of a mound, and then knocked the plant out of the pot and separated out its roots. (It worked out at about 1kg of sand / plant, a 20kg bag did 20 plants)

When I potted up last year I used a mixture of 1L, 1.5L and 2L pots that I had lying around ... long-story-short if I was doing it again I would only use 2L pots ...

The fat roots had gone straight to the outside of the pot and then ground around the outside of the rootball. These were easy to separate out in the 2L pots, but in the 1L I had to stick my thumbs into the middle of the bottom and pull hard to get the root ball separated enough to spread out, and even then the dis-entangled roots didn't "stick out" very far. However, it didn't feel like i was breaking any "fat roots", only the small feeing roots, so fingers-crossed.

This reduced the height of the root ball to only a couple of inches - i.e. most of it was transformed from rootball into saucer-shaped flattened roots

I pull back the earth on either side of the row - i.e. leaving the plants in a V about 4" deep, so I have earth to earth up with next Winter, and any watering / rain will be run down to the plants this Summer

Only other thing was something has already had a nibble at the very tips of a lot of the spears - so I have covered the lot with debris netting for now - well, until the Brassica beds is planted and needs it!