Portwood Asparagus
Did you know that asparagus is one of the first vegetables in the English growing season?
Up in Norfolk, Andy Allen has been cultivating asparagus for nearly 40 years. In fact, his family has been farming in Norfolk for two centuries. “When I was four or five, my grandmother used to send me out into her kitchen garden with a basket and knife to pick asparagus,” recalls Andy. “That’s how it all started!”
On the Portwood farm, Andy is cropping around 900 acres with 240 of those put down to asparagus. The soil is light and free draining, which is ideal for these plants which have a large root system called a ‘crown’.
From left: Andy Allen and Marcus Rowlerson
The asparagus crowns are planted in ridged beds. Andy mainly uses Dutch varieties. These are either grown from seed on his behalf or he buys one-year-old crowns from ‘crown raisers’ based in The Netherlands.
It takes three years from initial planting until the first crop. “You have to be patient for this job and have a good bank manager,” jokes Andy.
If conditions are right - for example, 10°C at night and 20°C during the day - the asparagus spears can grow up to 10cm in 24 hours. But if the weather turns cold it virtually stops growing.
For an early crop from the start of April, the asparagus plants are protected from wind and frost under small polythene tunnels that are 80cm wide and 50cm high. Andy states: “We are on the shelves and on menus about a month a month before anyone else.”
The majority of the crop is grown in open fields for harvest from St George’s Day, the 23rd of April. The spears are washed then chilled in a hydracooler within half an hour of being cut in the fields, then graded and packed to be in the Market within 24 hours.
Andy stops harvesting the crop on June 21st to allow the asparagus fern to grow and photosynthesise to build up energy in the crown for the following year.
Andy says he loves growing asparagus but is concerned by the current predicament of the farming industry in the UK due to the changes in inheritance tax law for farmers and increases in the expense of labour, which represent 70% of his costs with an asparagus crop. “The whole industry is on a knife edge at the moment,” Andy explains.
You can watch a video of Marcus’ trip to Portwood here on our Instagram.