I live in Spokane WA and planted Asparagus for the first time last year like the instructions said when I bought them. How do you get them to grow thick like the ones in the store? Mine are thinner than pencils and so I let them grow and now they are 2 feet tall and no better. Is it to late for them this year now? Thanks for any help.

Monti

I know next to nothing about growing asparagus (but I'm thinking about trying them!), but I believe you don't really get to harvest them for a few years after planting. There was an interesting article posted recently concerning asparagus, and although it mostly concerned cooking them, the comment section might be worth a read. Here's a link to the main article:
http://garden.org/ideas/view/T...
And there's some good information in this comment thread:
The thread "My first asparagus from my garden" in Asparagus, a Spring Delicacy

All I can remember about asparagus comes from the old Public Television show called The Victory Garden. They said to not harvest the first year; being a young, impatient person I chose to not plant something that would take two or more years for a meal.
Now I wish I had planted the asparagus.

That'll teach you not to think ahead! I do remember that my neighbor in SoCal planted asparagus, and she didn't harvest any spears till the third year.

Third year is best to begin harvesting even if you start out with plants that are supposedly "two years old". There will always be fat ones and skinny ones but fewer of the skinny, which you can snap off and put in the compost, eat raw or add to a salad.

A new neighbor dropped over, almost 20 years ago, and loved our asparagus patch but moaned about having to wait for years to eat them. I told her it's just a 12 x 12' area and she only had a huge field of grass behind her home so would she rather wait and have asparagus or have her husband mow it forever. She never planted any so still can't enjoy it fresh from the garden. I pick ours at 6:45 and we're eating them, roasted, at 7 PM.

12x12' of asparagus. That's a lot of asparagus! You are correct in the harvest timing. You want the asparagus spears/leaves to channel all the energy possible to the root system during the first two years. Depending on the size of the planting, you'll begin to harvest that third year, but only take the ones that are between a pencil thickness and the thickness of your little finger. Leave the small ones alone, letting them grow to leaf and thus returning energy back into the root system. Each year after, you will have a larger patch and the harvestable spears will get larger.

Precisely!

Come late November they get cut back to the earth but they do form an interesting block of green until the frost turns them yellow. This was our only reliable helper, Neri, who returned to Guatemala the week after this photo was taken. After cutting them back (for the chipper, then for compost), each asparagus plant was covered with our own compost and paths were freshened with wood chips.

Now Jack and I get to have the fun of doing it all by ourselves - two days of cutting, compost, path work...but it's worth it.

Thanks to all for the advice next year will be yr 3. We will see how it goes.