While you are examining this photo I would like you to imagine Also Sprach Zarathustra, the music from 2001, is playing.
Daaaaaaaa.....
Daaaaaaaaaa.....
Daaaaaaaa.....
Da-dah........
(Bom, Bom, Bom, Bom, Bom, Bom, Bom, Bom)
Daaaaaaaa.....
Daaaaaaa....
Anyway that's enough of that. The reason this strangely phallic shoot has to have such tremendous music is that it is....
MY
FIRST
ASPARAGUS
EVER
(Bom, Bom, Bom, Bom, Bom, Bom, Bom, Bom, if i was Arabella I could have actually put this music on here, chiz)
Late last year I actually made the mistake of thinking it would be a good idea to create asparagus beds for autumn-planted varieties.
Forget it, honestly. I spent the whole winter worrying if the roots were still alive, and when Mark Diacono (and others) started to do asparagus reports about three weeks ago I became even more neurotic.
Eventually this afternoon I went down there and started forking over the soil. Carefully, mind.
But the general feeling of anxiety didn't go until I finally found a couple of little (admittedly-penis-shaped shoots) sticking up above the surface.
On the autumn-planting front I can say that I have lost about ten plants out of twenty and that even the ten that are still there aren't doing particularly well.
I actually dug one up on purpose before I found the pictured shoot and the roots haven't really done anything all winter. So my general verdict on autumn planting is, what a load of rubbish. Half the crop dead and the rest only just getting growing, which is where they'd be if I'd planted them last week.
Sigh.
Hopefully by 2011 or whenever it is that I am actually allowed to start eating the bloody things the differences will have evened out.
But anyway, forget all that, because - 2001 music for my amazing shoot! And as for my stoopid autumn planting brainwave... as HAL the psychotic computer likes to say: "It can only be attributable to human error".
