Thursday, September 24, 2015

Can You Pick Asparagus The First Year

By Della Monroe


There are some vegetables in our gardens which come back yearly, and those plants must be nurtured in a way very different from the other vegetables and edible flower varieties. Others need to be harvested daily and not allowed to go to seed or they will cease to produce. With the upsurge in survival gardening these past twenty years, people need to ask, can you pick asparagus the first year.

The fact is, you can, but not all season long. The spears do come back each year in most regions, so one needs to allow the roots and tubers to mature. If a harvest is done for only about two weeks, then the plants are allowed to complete their cycle of maturity, the next Spring will see an even better crop.

Broccoli is totally different, as it will die and only come back through the gathering of seeds. If one does not harvest the florets religiously, then it will make pretty yellow flowers and go to seed, but there will be no more floret to harvest. If the seeds are not harvested, then it is possible there will be no new broccoli in that area the next Spring.

In the South, sometimes broccoli will come back from seed the next Spring, but not always. Apparently the harsh summer months followed by at least one hard freeze in winter kills the seeds which might have come up the next year. One can harvest seeds, but only if your vegetables are an heirloom variety and not a GMO hybridized plant.

Chickens and vegetable gardens go hand-in-hand, as the chickens can be allowed to roam outside the area of the vegetables and they will eat the pests that eat the crop. It is a great way to allow the chickens to road, so long as the run is fully enclosed in chicken wire to keep the chickens out of the vegetables, and also to protect them. The chicken waste can be collected and saved for fertilizer the next year.

It may sound like they are not free-roaming, but guinea hens in the wild have a small territory. Chickens do not need to have acres of space to roam in, but the average back yard will do. Should one live in an area where such farm animals are forbidden may want to stick with hens and have no crowing roosters, and a privacy fence is also a good idea.

Most gardeners are doing so because they want to be able to feed their families in a crisis, and this is an excellent and noble reason. Some people do it so their children will have the experience in their childhood. However, the most informed of the people are growing their own food because they know the GMO foods in the grocery stores may not be as safe as the FDA would like people to think.

Growing fruits and vegetables in the yard allows one to make sure everything is sun-ripened on the vine. Many fruits and vegetables one might find at the local supermarket are picked green and allowed to ripen in transit. Most fruits and vegetables done this way are hard and lack the flavor that foods had when most of us were children.




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