How asparagus grows

I currently have one stem of asparagus planted in the garden. I grew it from bare roots, which isn't my favourite way of growing plants as I have such a high failure rate with the bare-root ones. But in this case, I never seemed to manage to get to the garden centre at the right time to buy asparagus in pots and one of the two roots I bought took and I now have a thin single stem of asparagus. This year is its second year in my garden. Here it is on 13 April, a tiny very scrawny stem. It's recognisably asparagus, but way too thin to be worth eating - and harvesting it would probably have killed the plant.

Here it is on 21 April, just 8 days later. It's not got any fatter, but it's got a lot taller and developed side shoots and the beginning of leaves:

And here it is on 12 May. It now has loads of fluffy leaves, but it's now so heavy that it's too skinny to hold itself up and I had to help it with a cane. When it's been in the garden for a few more years, it should have nice thick, sturdy stems and shouldn't need the cane any more.

Edited: excitingly, on 25 May I noticed my asparagus had grown a second, ever so slightly less spindly stem:

Back on 13 May, in other news, all my onions are growing fast and strong and my beans are now all planted:

I've had a bit of trouble with black fly on my broad beans, but it's still at an early stage and I've given them a good spray with water mixed with a few drops of washing-up liquid. The trick to spraying plants for aphids with water and washing-up liquid appears to be to do it when they're in the shade. This seems to avoid damaging the plants.

I hope I've planted enough beans to get a good harvest this year. They definitely seem happy in the partial shade side of the garden, it's a shame crop rotation means I can't just keep them there.

The strawberries are also doing well. My other half kindly fixed the sagging bottom of their container and they are now happy as Larry back in their wooden planter. I've used shredded paper as mulch because it's much cheaper than straw. In fact, companies keep sending me ever greater piles of paper to shred for the garden and what I don't need for mulch goes on the compost heap. The red thing you can see that looks like a strawberry  is actually a painted stone, designed to persuade the birds that these plants produce inedible strawberries. I can't say for certain that it's worked, but I haven't suffered any damage I believe to be caused by birds yet.

I've also taken all my seedlings other than the tomatoes and peppers outside to start hardening them off. Unless there's unexpected bad weather in the meantime, they'll mainly be going out into their final positions in the garden next weekend.

I'm pretty pleased with how the pond area is looking too. It was meant to be a fernery down there, but the ferns are taking their time growing, whereas foxgloves have self-seeded everywhere and I love the look, so I'm now thinking it should be more of a shade garden than a fernery. I'm considering moving my astilbe from the front garden back there as well, or maybe dividing it. I got it for 50p from the manky plants section of B&Q where they sell off all the plants they haven't looked after properly at a discount. I was swayed by the 50p price tag more than having a definite place to put it in mind, and it's very much a shade-loving plant. I think I may also need to look for some more shade-loving wildflowers to fill in the gaps and feed the bees.

I've also cleared most of the duckweed out of the pond with a sieve. Getting all of the duckweed appears to be an impossible task, as no matter how hard I try more always seems to appear, but in a pond this size it's easy enough to keep down to a low level with a sieve. You may also notice that all but one of my pond plants has died - or all but two if you count the duckweed. I'm not sure what happened there, but I have no plans to buy more in the near future.

So, the garden is almost ready for summer, the hard work I've put in planting things is barely visible right now, but it should be an completely different story in a month of two.