Failures

Sometimes you just have to call them what they are, and I've had a couple already this year.

The stick in the middle of this photo marks the spot where I planted a bareroot rhubarb on April 4th.

Nothing ever came of it. Clearly, the weeds grew well, however.

This one is supposed to be asparagus.

In fact, there were seven of them in this area.

I got one tiny little sprout, but never saw anything else.

I was more disappointed by the asparagus than the rhubarb. Truth be told, the rhubarb root looked a little moldy when I planted it, so I figured it might not do well. The asparagus, however, I expected to grow. I bought the plants at a garden center, so they came in a plastic bag. Several of them were sprouting in the bag. but that hasn't been a problem before.

The worst part about the asparagus is that I had such a promising start with asparagus three years ago. I planted a few crowns in my big garden, and they grew very well. They were huge. I would've had plenty to eat from them by now.

Unfortunately, then I set into motion a series of events that led to where I am now: sitting here with no asparagus. First, I decided to move those plants because they were hard to get to in the garden. After moving them to their own raised bed, most of them didn't survive. At that point, I bought some more crowns and planted them. They were growing slowly, and then we moved. It's possible that Lois will be eating asparagus from those plants next year, but it looks like I won't have asparagus from the garden for awhile.

In an effort to mitigate my failures, I bought a tiny rhubarb plant last weekend, and put him smack dab in the middle of what had been the asparagus bed. Take that, asparagus.