I am new here :) Asparagus variety ?

[RayFromFranceMember]

I am Raymond, a 55 year old swede
living in the southwest of France since 1993.

and I am a beginner….only did 30 square yards for 3 years,
but moving to a 3 acre land in august.

Here in France there seems to be no choice of variety
when it comes to asparagus. Just green, white and red.

Do you have more varieties in England ?

I understand that crowns should be planted in spring only.
Then I will mulch my asparagus bed with plastic until then.
Same for the artichoke bed.

I plan to do 200 yards of asparagus and 200 yards of artichokes
because I love both of them !

Also, I will grow lots of blueberries and other berries.

Hope to meet some of you one day at Charle’s week-end workshops.

Best Regards, Raymond

[charlesModerator]

 Hello Raymond and welcome.
Your project sounds amazing!

I cannot help much on asparagus varieties as I only know Connovers Colossal, a stahdard and productive variety in the UK, and one or two all-male hybrids which are reckoned to be more productive, and do not drop seeds (asparagus farmers find their worst weed is asparagus seedlings!). However I was happy with Connovers and perhaps you could try two or three varieties of whatever does well for your neighbours. Green asparagus which grows above ground is easier to harvest and probably more nutritious than growing it white.

I look forward to meeting you and hearing all about it one day.

[RayFromFranceMember]

I translated this on google. Not perfect, but understandable.
An interesting note here is that they say that the green and white is all one plant, at least for this variety.

VARIETY OF ASPARAGUS

There are many varieties of asparagus in Europe. In the South of France, we grow mainly three varieties: ACR, Argenteuil and PREBELLE. The first two have been replaced in recent years by the Dutch hybrids or clones as Grolim GIMLIM and which represent more than half of cultivation at present. Most of the varieties produce either white or green asparagus, only the mode of culture define the color of spears. It suffices to butter (covering a mound of earth 30 cm) the asparagus crowns to produce white spears and instead let it grow in the open air and sunlight to produce asparagus nice and green.

In Provence, particularly in the Vaucluse, we select and preserved an old French variety, PREBELLE. Its performance is quite low, but the caliber of shoots is very important (22 + representing more than 50% of asparagus, I recall that the caliber of the asparagus is 12-16, 16-22, 22 +, 24 + … expresses the diameter in millimeters of the base of the stalk). The growth of this variety is very fast and gives very little fibrous stalks. She is also very sweet and postharvest has the advantage not to twist.

All these qualities have earned him to be on the card as many different names as asparagus Lauris Villelaure, Perth, Pernes fountains restaurants … In the end, that’s add more asparagus is fresher, it is soft and very very fibrous.

In recent years, we grow a variety of asparagus old Italian native Liguria, whence comes its name, asparagus purple lilac. Much softer than the green asparagus is a garnet purple color. She unfortunately the disadvantage to green when cooked.

Here is the original website in french :

http://galistruffe.over-blog.com/pages/VARIETES_DASPERGES-2704517.html

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