Plant Profile-Asparagus

Over the next few days we will be posting some plant profiles. Other then normal info on each plant we plan on including helpful hints and at least one recipe. We hope that you will enjoy this information and that it will be helpful.


Asparagus:

This plant is a long lived plant, meaning that this plant can be planted once and you can continue to harvest for many years after-wards.

Moist sandy soil is ideal with a good set of compost amend in. Also remember to plant asparagus where you plan to leave it. So pick a good spot, one where you can see the asparagus still being years from now. Dig trenches 8-10 inches and space crowns 4-5 ft apart. Young asparagus benefits from phosphorus and avoid high-nitrogen fertilizers. If needed, add a 5-10-10 fertilizer in the spring.

Weeding is critical to keep asparagus beds productive. Allow young shoots to develop, but cut them back to the ground in fall after a hard freeze.

Leave asparagus alone the 1st year of planting. In your second year harvest for only a couple of weeks and then in your 3rd year you can harvest for longer.

Pest include: The Fusarium Wilt and the asparagus beetles.

Helpful hints and tips:
The harvest doesn’t stop them. Even cut off from their roots, the asparagus spears keep growing at the tip. If they’re stored lying down, the tips rise away from the pull of gravity, and can bend 60 degrees or more from the stalk before they run out of energy.
Most of this loss of sweetness and toughening happens in the first day after harvest. Farmers can minimize it by chilling new-cut asparagus right away. But a delay of just four hours between harvest and chilling causes the spears to toughen significantly. So does allowing the chilled spears to warm up to 60 degrees or more in a grocery display or at the farmers’ market.

Recipes:
Creamed Asparagus Soup recipe can be found here.

References and for more fun reading:
Book of Joe

Miracle-Gro's Complete Guide to Vegetables, Fruits, and Herbs.

Happy Valentine's Day

We want to wish everyone out there a very Happy Valentine's Day. We hope everyone enjoyed their day, as we did ours. Today is a very special day, other than it being Valentine's Day. Today is our birthday, yes, both of us. I got David a Sirius radio system for his car and he got me a locket that I have been wanting and his big surprise for me was a green house. We have a small one on our back porch now, but this one is much bigger.
<----This is like the one we have on the back porch.








<-----The one he got me today looks like this...



We will take some photos once we put it up tomorrow.

L&D
The Vegetable Hatt

Starting the seeds

We will be starting our seeds soon and found 40 small pots at the dollar store today to start our new seeds in. We have drawn out our garden plots, as we use the square foot gardening system, so we always have lots of plants. We will have 24 cucumber plants, 32 leeks, 4 squash plants, 32 onions, 32 carrots, 8 cayenne pepper plants, 8 hot peppers, 16 Kentucky Wonder Beans, 8 okra, 16 corn plants, 4 bell pepper plants, 16 black bean plants, 8 cherry tomato plants, 8 large tomato plants, 4 zucchini plants, 16 english peas, 16 snowbird peas, and 8 jelly tomato's. That will also still leave us 8 open spots to put something else in, if we desire. We planted 20 strawberry plants in one of our slotted pots the other day. We will also be planting asparagus, potatoes, and sweet potatoes this season. What will you be planting?

L&D
The Vegetable Hatt

The First Blog

This will be my very first blog. Sure I have written many other blogs on Myspace and Facebook, but this blog is different. This blog will be about our garden. I have been growing veggies for over 20 years now, but for the last 2 years the vegetable patch has been here in Central Florida. Home of sand. LOL We moved from the Georgia/Alabama state line, from a little known place called Columbus. In Columbus you deal with Georgia red clay and with about only 4-5 months of growing time. So moving to Florida was a growing shock. We live on an acre of land with most of it being behind our house. We have a small veggie patch with 4 1/2 raised beds and then we have around a half acre in what we call our very back yard. We hope and are in the planning stages of turning the very back into our own little sanctuary. As for the garden patch it has strawberries, spinach's, lettuces, collards, onions, turnips, broccoli, and cauliflower planted in it right now. We are still getting use to planting in sand, but the raised beds have pretty much fixed that problem. We also use the square foot garden method that helps us to have lots of space.

So you may ask yourself why we decided to make another blog with all the blogs out there in the world wide web. Well about 6 months ago we started looking for more information on planting in Central Fl. We wanted more info from people, not books. Now don't get us wrong, we love books (more then you will ever know lol) and books are full of wonderful information, but sometimes you want to hear it (or read it) from someones own mouth. Someone who lives in your town or at least near you. Well we looked and we search, but the closes we came to was a blog from Orlando about 45 miles away from us. Also that blog was about flowers, not veggies, and I can't grow a flower to save my life, but I have a green thumb when it comes to veggies! Now Orlando is not THAT far away but anyone who has lived in Florida can tell you the weather between this neighborhood and the next one can be two different things. If you happen to know of a vegetable blog, please let us know!

So after about a month of thinking about the pro's and con's of doing this blog, we decided to go for it. What could it hurt? It can help other people out there with info of growing veggies and if nothing else it can give us a written diary of our gardening experience. So we hope that you enjoy our gardening blog and come back often!

L and D
The Vegetable Hatt