SOWING THE SEED 



money's worth and a trifle over, and it often means also 

 that you will get what no one else wants. 



Having purchased reliable seeds, draw drills about 

 two inches deep and a foot apart. Anyone accustomed 

 to sowing onions can do this, but as the seeds are four 

 times the size of onion seeds a wider drill might be 

 used. Sow thinly, and lend no ear to the people who 

 say that you can thin asparagus after it is up. Three 

 pounds of seed will sow rows a mile in length. I sowed 

 this amount of seed on Easter Monday, three years ago, 

 and as a result I raised twenty-five thousand plants, 

 which are now strong and fit to produce splendid 

 asparagus. A friend of mine, at the same time, used 

 the same amount of seed in a length of three hundred 

 yards. His plants came up thickly, and well they looked, 

 but they never reached a foot in height during the 

 first year, whilst mine, topped twenty-six inches. My 

 thick-sowing friend would find a great difficulty in 

 parting his plants ; the crowns would be weakly, and 

 the roots would be so broken in parting that good 

 growth would be long postponed. When the seed is 

 sown I mix together two parts bone meal, two parts 

 kainit, and one part sulphate of ammonia, and sow the 

 mixture in the drills at the rate of about one pound to 

 ten yards' length of drill, carefully covering it up with a 

 rake. I referred to the drills as being much like those 

 made for the sowing of onions, but there is this dif- 

 ference, that when sowing asparagus the ground must 

 not be trodden unduly before or after the sowing. 

 Onions are required to bulb well, hence it is necessary 

 to "firm" the ground for them, but it is desirable that 

 asparagus roots run freely near the surface, and a loose 

 soil is by far the best to encourage this habit. The 

 plants will not appear quickly whereas the weeds will, 

 so that if a mark can be made to show the seed row so 

 much the better ; but generally the row can be dis- 



