Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Wild asparagus

How many are looking to mark next years patches?

Not wild but i planted 100 plants this year and can't wait to get on them next year.

It took a lot of will power not to cut just enough for one bite,knowing that it would not just be once.

The pivot sprinklers pretty much wiped out the wild asparagus here. We used to walk ditch banks and could pick bags of it. When farmers put in pivots, all the ditches disappeared. The pheasants disappeared, too. There's no cover now.

still get some around here.....3-4 weeks in May

This past year was bad with the very dry conditions

'Coons take care of our pheasant population.....bass turds

I used to be able to pick all the asparagus I wanted by walking the back roads, no more. Since the townships have started spraying the banks along the road to kill the weeds, no more asparagus.

We had it when I was a kid. I haven’t seen it in a long time!!

See it on the roadsides at times, but always when it’s leafed out. No matter, we have scads in the garden now. Took time and effort to get it going good, but now it’s almost a relief when the picking time is over. Volunteers pop up all over.

Asparagus is resistant to 2-4-D. In a home garden, using 2-4-D will kill the broadleaf weeds and any grass killer with Sethoxydim will take out the grass. Asparagus is resistant to both. Do your spraying after the harvest season is over.
One time I got the bright idea of cutting it all below the ground level and covering the stumps with dirt. Then spray the weeds with roundup. Don't do that.

I don't have to depend on wild asparagus.
I've got 3 "spare-grass" patches.
One is about 10 years old and we can cut for about 6 weeks
The second one is about five years old and we can cut about 5 weeks on it.
The third we planted last year. We'll cut a few spears off it this spring.
A neighbor up the road has about 1/2 acre of the stuff and sells it by the pound! Hundreds of pounds! 😳
They cut for about 6 weeks in the spring.

It makes your pee stink.

It was a great way to kill a Sunday afternoon when I was a kid. That morning's walleyes, plus baby potatoes and some asparagus you picked yourself...yum, that's eating. Plenty of it around home still but not alot in my area here. Too dry for it to be really successful.

Added it to lunch when I worked on a road crew.

Asparagus story.

When I purchased our twenty acres, there was one five acre field which had lain fallow for over twenty five years. I decided to do some land leveling and then plowing with my Ford 8N, then grow alfalfa on the ground.

I was happily plowing along with a 1 bottom grasshopper, when I was suddenly thrown out of the seat and face down on the hood of the tractor.

The plow had hit an asparagus root mass about 24 inches in diameter and 16 inches in depth. It brought me to an instant stop and stalled the engine.

It took an hour or so to work that root ball out of the soil with the plow.

Later, I regretted that I had not divided it up into about 100 pieces to plant in the garden.

As a kid we used to pick a lot around Burley. We used to have a decent pheasant population too. I remember pheasants going down significantly when they reintroduced several red foxes in the early 90s. Part of the Clinton plan to bring in Natural predators so people wouldn't hunt anymore.

Bb

The area around Paul used to be a pheasant mecca. A few years ago we drove through there in the winter and it was solid plowed land literally for miles. Not a fence or ditch row in sight. It's all sprinkler irrigation now and the fences and ditches were in the way.

We have it growing wild over a lot of our place. We look forward to it every spring. Usually way more than we can get through.

You have to head out north towards the Butte and check the lava rock piles in the middle of the fields to find pheasants out their now. During my college years I spend a few seasons driving double bellie dumps full of beets to the sugar factory in Paul. I spent a lot of time at the beet dumps out north and often saw pheasants just before my shift ended early in the AM. I'd get off work and run my car back out and shoot a few. Those 84 hour weeks didn't leave a lot of time to hunt but I worked some in.

Bb

I wish we had some down here... I can eat that stuff at every meal

I can't even imagine the idea of wild asparagus.

Thank you very much!

I had been planning to do that very thing with Glyphosate.

Figured it wouldn't hurt anything, no residual and all.

We have a patch about 80' long, 2 rows.
20 years old, various Jersey varieties, Martha Washinton, and purple.
Some of it is getting old I'm afraid. Plus, the last couple years it's not
been weeded and munched well. Was looking for an easy shortcut.