sooo, my little asparagus plants are sending up little spears,
the plants are now one year old.
I have a niggle in the back of my head about needing to sex them, so how and wht?
do i want boys or girls?
lbb
You want boys because they put less effort into providing pollen than the girls do in producing their berries, therefore boys come up fatter.
You can't sex them until they have flowered after which some produce berries and some don't. The latter are the boys.....
I've gone over to all male hybrids bought from commercial firms that have weeded out the females.
I potted on 90 seedlings this morning from the modules they were in to bigger modules (15 pots per tray)..... My plan is to keep them all in pots this year, hopefully get to sex them then and split it into two groups. All the males plus a few females (future seed stock :D) go into the permanent bed, the rest of the females split into two groups. One into a bed, the rest in big pots once the tomatos etc are finished with them this year..... Pots go into the greenhouse to be forced and slaughtered next year, the femal bed gets the same treatment the year after next thus leaving the permanent bed until the year after that before it starts to get picked..... by which time the plants in there should be very well established.....
THey're UC72 in case that matters to anyone, a wilt/rust/drought resistnat variety developed frmo Mary Washington...
chrisc
ok, so they will all flower,
the girls will make berries
i plant the boys in my asparagus bed
i keep the girls in pots and eat any spears they produce next year then compost them
the boys i dont pick till they are 3 years old or 4 years old?
lbb
Quote from: littlebabybird on May 08, 2009, 12:50:44
ok, so they will all flower,
the girls will make berries
i plant the boys in my asparagus bed
i keep the girls in pots and eat any spears they produce next year then compost them
the boys i dont pick till they are 3 years old or 4 years old?
lbb
It rather depends on how many plants you've got really.... the reckoning is about 12 plants per person likely to be eating them for a couple of pickings a week in the season and maybe 25 or so per person if you fancy freezing some (I'll be makiong asparagus soup as I love it and it freezes well) .... If you've got an open pollinated variety but not many plants then keep them all but strip the berries from all the females bar one, grow more plants from the seeds in the berries and grow on using an interim bed to determine sex, then replace most of the females and brutalize the spare the next season....to extend the season each year you could always grow a dozen or so plants each year frmo berries and rotate out to allow for indoor forcing in the GH each year.....it depends on how much you like asparagus I guess.....
Even though the males are the heavy croppers I'd keep a couple of females in there just so that you can use the seeds to keep yourself in plants..... if you grow a few every year and don't need them then I would expect you'll not have a problem giving them away or swapping them......
chrisc
I have 'all male' varieties, and find the odd plant producing berries. Still waiting for them to emerge!
Quote from: Robert_Brenchley on May 08, 2009, 21:26:01
I have 'all male' varieties, and find the odd plant producing berries. Still waiting for them to emerge!
Even with the "best" of modern plant breeding techniques I doubt they ever will get a perfect F1 all single-sex strain.... even F1 all female cucmbers still throw the occasional male flower..... with asparagus at least the plant is dimorphic anyway so you can select.....
Discovering how grateful one of the other allotmenteers at work was to recieve a tray full of small pots with the spares from my potting on I reckon I could probably fund all my gardening expenses through swapping and selling asparagus plants :D They're in the propagator during the gap between the early hardy (onions mostly) and indoor stuff (toms peppers etc) and the outdoor frost sensitive stuff like squash and sweetcorn.... I don't think it would be that hard to get a couple of hundred going per year, I can get 6" pots for free.... this might all be dashed if I discover that the plants are bigger prima donna's than my four-year-old niece :D
chrisc