The Three Year Wait for a Vegetable That Grows Five Inches in a Day

Most of you will never grow asparagus. Not because it’s hard to grow. Because it takes almost three years before you can eat it.

Asparagus is one of the slowest maturing edible plants in the world. When you plant asparagus crowns in the ground, you cannot harvest a single spear for two full years. Some guides say wait three years if you started from seed.¹

For those first two or three years, asparagus puts everything into building a really thick root system called a crown. It’s not a bulb. It’s not a tuber. It’s a storage organ, a mass of fleshy roots that acts like an energy bank.² The plant is saving up. Stockpiling. Waiting.

The crown can sit underground storing energy for an entire year before sending up a single spear you’re allowed to eat. If you harvest too early, if you take even one spear in that first year, you weaken the plant. It may never recover. Some growers say plants harvested too heavily too soon become weak and spindly for life.³

Once that crown is fully developed, that one plant can feed a family for 20 years. Asparagus is perennial. Plant it once, it comes back every spring for 12 to 15 years. Some sources say 20.⁴

Then something strange happens.