I came home to Pennsylvania this weekend to resume work on the garden. Spring is such a wonderful time to be alive! Many trees were budding (including both of my apple trees), and some were even flowering. On Saturday morning, birds are chirping everywhere, a falcon circled the turquoise sky. Our neighbor's dog, Biscuits, was lounging around, and my backyard was awash with the verdant colors of new growth.
Before even starting my work, I noticed strange tufts of green grass growing all around the back of our property and extending a bit into our neighbor’s yard. There were dozens of such plants. Upon closer examination, I realized that these little plants were the descendants of the 4 heirloom green onions that I grew last year. The green onions are cut and come again annual vegetables whose seeds are propagated by the wind. Apparently, the 4 original onion plants had cross-pollinated each other. Their children must have colonized the marginal lands adjacent to the two properties.
And the land is surely marginal, stuck between my garden and my neighbor's flower beds, it's rocky as hell and laced with pine needles. The only plants growing there are some weeds, lichen, and of course my onions!!! This fortunate colonization will provide our family with several times the amount of edible green onions as compared to last year, and without any additional effort on our part. What we are seeing is in effect, permaculture in action. Our plant has created a niche for itself in a previously barren habitat.
After examining the green onions, I went straight to work. Seven new V-shaped troughs were created with the trusty shovel and pick-ax. Three of them were along my neighbor’s fence to the east, another four were dug along the land bordering our neighbor to the south. These troughs were about a foot long, six inches wide, and ten inches deep. The bottom of each trough was lined with rich compost and buffered with three inches of organic garden soil. The four troughs along the southern edge of the backyard had to be fortified with extra garden soil, since the natural soil base there is so poor and rocky to begin with. Each trough is then given a single asparagus crown buried under another 3 inches of garden soil and then watered thoroughly. In time(hopefully) the asparagus will become a hedge like border that produces food and acts as a windbreak.
The asparagus is a perennial plant that once established, will produce nutritious green spears for decades. While the reproductive strategies of plants are varied and interesting in general, the strategy taken by the asparagus is highly unconventional in my opinion. Basically, a parent Asparagus’ root system is composed of crowns of individual root shoots. Now depending on environmental conditions or just plain chance, some of these crowns will bud off or get broken off from the main root structure. Each crown has the potential of becoming an independent Asparagus plant. Yet unlike other budding root plants, each crown isn’t a clone of the parent, it’s actually a bundle of genetically distinct child asparagus cells surrounded by the parent’s root tissue. As a newly broken crown grows, the child cells will replace the parent tissue, cell by cell. Thus, prior to budding, it is as if a parent plant and all of it’s children are part of the same functioning organism!
I came home to Pennsylvania this weekend to resume work on the garden. Spring is such a wonderful time to be alive! Many trees were budding (including both of my apple trees), and some were even flowering. On Saturday morning, birds are chirping everywhere, a falcon circled the turquoise sky. Our neighbor's dog, Biscuits, was lounging around, and my backyard was awash with the verdant colors of new growth.
And the land is surely marginal, stuck between my garden and my neighbor's flower beds, it's rocky as hell and laced with pine needles. The only plants growing there are some weeds, lichen, and of course my onions!!! This fortunate colonization will provide our family with several times the amount of edible green onions as compared to last year, and without any additional effort on our part. What we are seeing is in effect, permaculture in action. Our plant has created a niche for itself in a previously barren habitat.
After examining the green onions, I went straight to work. Seven new V-shaped troughs were created with the trusty shovel and pick-ax. Three of them were along my neighbor’s fence to the east, another four were dug along the land bordering our neighbor to the south. These troughs were about a foot long, six inches wide, and ten inches deep. The bottom of each trough was lined with rich compost and buffered with three inches of organic garden soil. The four troughs along the southern edge of the backyard had to be fortified with extra garden soil, since the natural soil base there is so poor and rocky to begin with. Each trough is then given a single asparagus crown buried under another 3 inches of garden soil and then watered thoroughly. In time(hopefully) the asparagus will become a hedge like border that produces food and acts as a windbreak.
The asparagus is a perennial plant that once established, will produce nutritious green spears for decades. While the reproductive strategies of plants are varied and interesting in general, the strategy taken by the asparagus is highly unconventional in my opinion. Basically, a parent Asparagus’ root system is composed of crowns of individual root shoots. Now depending on environmental conditions or just plain chance, some of these crowns will bud off or get broken off from the main root structure. Each crown has the potential of becoming an independent Asparagus plant. Yet unlike other budding root plants, each crown isn’t a clone of the parent, it’s actually a bundle of genetically distinct child asparagus cells surrounded by the parent’s root tissue. As a newly broken crown grows, the child cells will replace the parent tissue, cell by cell. Thus, prior to budding, it is as if a parent plant and all of it’s children are part of the same functioning organism!
2 comments:
Outstanding!
Down here, in West Tennessee, I was able to start an asparagus/strawberry patch back on March 1st in a 4' x 16' raised bed. I've got about 28 shoots, with a couple of the crowns sending up 3 or four at a time! Some of them haven't sent up anything yet. The 16 strawberries are filling out, and starting to blossom. It feels so good knowing that both of these plantings will continue to be here for years and years! Even better, they both help each other-- the strawberries carpet the bed against weeds, and the asparagus keeps away strawberry pests.
In the meantime, while the strawberries are still gathering strength, I've planted in some parsley, nasturtiums, peas, spinach, lettuces, chard and radishes all around the empty spaces. Except for the parsley and nasturtiums, everything else will clear out in it's prescribed time, and the strawberries will fill in.
It will be a bountiful spring!
BTW-- I have been following your reports at the LATOC forum! Way to go!
--mf
I'm envious. I want to start growing asparagus too. I will try it but my hopes aren't too high: it rains constantly in Ireland, and we're right by the sea. Still, gotta do it.
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