Dirty Business: The First Harvest, and Hardening Off Part One

Asparagus is one of those vegetables which grows really, really fast.  So fast that if you don’t check it every day—particularly during the peak harvest season—it will be very easy to let them grow beyond their edible stage.  Now, this being the beginning of the season, it’s much more manageable but I’ve been lulled into a false sense of security too many times in the past to make that mistake again.  Fortunately, the asparagus bed grows at different rates with each crown so it’s not like we’re harvesting a huge pile of it all at once.  Unfortunately that also means we need to be patient when gathering the asparagus until we get enough to start making dishes with it.

I first noticed a few stalks peeking out of the ground a couple of weeks ago and decided to take a picture of one of them every day until harvest time.  I won’t show the entire time-lapse sequence here because sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference from one day to the next, but the difference between two or three days is quite noticeable.  Here’s Day 1:

Realistically, it’s probably Day 2 since poking out of the ground, but this was the first day I noticed it so that’s what we’re going with.  Here’s Day 3:

Yes, those are onions from the eleventy-billion plants we got and for which I had to find room to put in the ground.  So far, it looks like I placed them correctly and none appear to be getting pushed out by the asparagus.  Day 5:

Day 7:

Day 9:

Day 11 (or maybe 12 considering the note above).  Harvest day!

That’s a perfect stalk of asparagus.  Not too thick, not too thin, and just the right height before the stalk starts to flower and branch out—which it would probably have started doing if I’d left it for another day or two.

To harvest, I simply get a pair of scissors and cut them off at the dirt line—maybe just a hair below.  I was able to get two stalks that day and a couple more the next day.  It’s also important to be consistent with harvesting because it stimulates more production from the crowns–this is the same principle at work when harvesting other vegetables like zucchini or cucumbers. While we wait for more asparagus to get harvested, we keep them in a tall plastic container with some water in the bottom and placed in the refrigerator.  I figure within a few more days there will be enough asparagus for cooking.  By the beginning of June, we’ll have several containers of asparagus waiting to get prepared.  By the end of June, I’ll be so sick of asparagus that I’ll gladly stop harvesting so the crowns can recover and let everything grow into tall ferns.

Next, a brief discussion about hardening off.  For plants which get started indoors, they need to get acclimated to eventually being transplanted outside.  You can’t just take a plant that has spent a couple of months indoors and stick it outside in the ground.  That will shock the plant and likely kill it.  Hardening off is a process which involves getting the plant used to the temperature changes as well as strengthening the stems so they will be able to stand up to the weather.

So, for this first stage of hardening off, I use a fan to help the plants get stronger.  In the finished basement, where the plants get started, the fan is positioned so that it is just strong enough to make the plants move a bit without actually blowing them over.

While this takes place, the plants don’t grow upward so much as their stems get thicker and root systems get stronger.  This is another good means by which to keep plants from growing too quickly and getting leggy and weak.

In a couple of weeks, we’ll start putting them outside in a cold frame for the day, but I’ll get into more detail on that when it happens.