The first asparagus spears emerge in April. Harvest them with a knife or snap off by hand

Asparagus is one of the earliest vegetables you can harvest from your garden. The reason is because it is a perennial, which means once it is established, it comes up every year. There’s no need to replant it annually.

By the middle of April this year, we have already harvested our first batch, which gave us enough asparagus spears for two of us to enjoy.

Asparagus is considered ready to harvest whenever the spears reach 6 to 9 inches long and have the diameter of a pencil or larger. Most of the asparagus we see in the supermarket produce department fits that description.

However, homegrown asparagus can get much wider than that. It’s not unusual to find very old asparagus plants producing spears an inch wide or more. The larger diameter spears are also much tastier than the thin ones.

The reason why store bought asparagus is so small is because it takes years for asparagus plants to get big enough to grow spears of a larger size. Farmland is too valuable for farmers to wait years for asparagus to get full size. There’s also other expenses that factor into producing their crop including cost of asparagus crowns, fertilizer, pest control, interest on borrowed money, property taxes and on and on. Add all of that together and you can see why it is in the best interest of the farmers not to hold off too many years before harvesting a crop.

As gardeners we have the luxury of waiting as long as it takes to harvest larger diameter spears as our plants mature. Established asparagus plants can be productive for decades.

The old advice was to wait to harvest your first spears until the second or even third year after planting. Research has shown that harvesting a light crop of spears the first year is OK. Harvesting spears for a couple weeks the first year doesn’t harm the plants or reduce future production.

In order to keep an asparagus crop going, the spears must be harvested before they begin to produce leaves, also known as “ferning out.” When harvesting, remove all spears, including the thin spindly ones and those that may be damaged in some way. If those poor-growing spears are left to grow and fern out, it will slow down production.

As the asparagus plants get larger in later years, your harvesting season will last six to eight weeks. That’s a nice long season for any garden crop, especially an early one.

This time of year, it may be two or three days between harvesting. Later, as the weather warms up, you’ll need to harvest every day to keep up with all of the spears that are growing.

There are two schools of thought about how to harvest the asparagus spears. On one side of the argument are the cutters, who use knives or other cutting tools to cut the spears. On the other side are the snappers who prefer to snap off the spears with their fingers. Like most disagreements, each group has good reasons for doing what they do.

Asparagus grows up from buds located underground on its crown, the part that connects the tops with the roots. There are several buds in close proximity to each other on the crown. When using a knife to cut asparagus spears, there is the chance of damaging nearby, unseen buds that are still growing under the soil.

Snapping off the spears eliminates any chance of damaging other buds. During snapping, the spear breaks off right where the tender part of the spear meets the lower, tougher white part of the spear.

This white area serves to reduce moisture loss from the spear. Spears that are cut with some of the white part attached will last much longer in storage.

Snapping is handy in the garden if you happen to forget to bring along your knife.

There are special asparagus knives on the market that have handle on one end and a forked cutting profile on the cutting end. You’ve probably seen these tools sold as dandelion weeders.

We just have a small asparagus patch, so I just use a slim kitchen knife that I keep with my garden tools. To cut with a knife, just run the knife blade against the spear until the point reaches an inch or two below the soil. Then turn the sharp edge to make a clean cut without damaging other spears.

If you can’t cook your asparagus spears right away, refrigerate them upright in a container with a bit of water on the bottom. If they are laid flat, over time they tend to bend themselves into a curve.

Many years ago, I had a fairly large asparagus patch. That year we were going away for several days in the spring. An acquaintance asked if he could cut some asparagus while I was gone and I thought to myself that would help keep the spears from ferning out too early. When I got back home, and looked at the asparagus all I could see were nothing but bare green stems 2 or 3 feet tall. The guy had cut only the tender asparagus tips from the spears and just left the rest of the spear to grow!