My asparagus bed has been producing a nice bundle of green asparagus every day for the last 6 weeks or so, which has been lovely of course, but I really wanted to keep my lovely Dutch wife happy with some white asparagus, which the Dutch go crazy for, but which is very hard to get hold of here in the UK. I have been trying to mound up the beds, with some success, but unless you check it several times a day the results are pretty variable.
Recycled plastic bed with two rows of asparagus plants, with the soil mounded up to protect and blanche the spears
The last time we went to the Netherlands we went to buy some bundles of asparagus from the local grower and she charmingly told us all about their methods when I told her I was trying to grow it here. She said the secret was using white/black plastic sheet (which I had of course seen everywhere) which blocks out the light. I managed to source some from a hydroponics specialist in Liverpool (I don't think that they were very interested in growing asparagus...) and spread it out last night:
Black/white polythene sheet to exclude light from the asparagus bed.
I might not have installed it correctly so I will see. I was slightly worried about the lack of water, the grower concerned assured me that they do not need to water due to the deep roots of the asparagus plant, but they are not on such dry ground as me and so I will water when I harvest the spears every few days. I won't be able to run it for very long, i need to let the plants recover, and I also want to grow tomatoes in between the rows to help ward off asparagus beetles. I'm not to sure that will work but I'm going to give it a go, and all the extra feeding and watering they will demand must have some impact.
My other project is turning the IBC (intermediate bulk container) I orderered when I was looking into the possibility of setting up an aquaponics system into a waterbutt. Initially I cut the top off and tried to invert it to make a funnel but the shape was not right and this did not work so I have used a tarpaulin instead. It seems to work very effectively as a rain catcher, but is too small to catch very much:
The next step is to increase the area to catch the rain (if we ever get any). I have a large sheet (3m x 1.8m) of recycled twinwall polycarbonate (the sort of thing normally used to make car port roofs) I am planning to fix onto the wooden structure I have made over the composters. This will be a permanent raincatcher, and I might also put up some tarpaulins over winter to catch rain (and also prevent the soil from getting waterlogged, making it easier to dig...). More to come soon I hope!
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