IT'S got stiff competition, but I reckon asparagus must be the tastiest plant you can grow.

Few vegetables are so popular that completely unrelated plants hijack their name to assume a more alluring lustre - asparagus pea, for one, which is faintly reminiscent of asparagus when smothered in butter.

Only a brave man should write about asparagus. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the indomitable Scots gardener James Justice wrote that growing asparagus could be "practised with very bad success ... owing to the ignorance of people who [only do] what they have heard of, or possibly read in some book"; he also claimed to have grown asparagus the equal of anything you could find at market. Having produced fairly good results over more than 30 years, I'll dare to tackle the subject.

When planted properly in a good position, asparagus crowns should keep cropping for at least 20 years, so choose plants carefully. When you're buying new crowns, always select "male only" varieties to be sure of a better crop. Male plants emerge earlier in the spring and remain productive for longer.

A female plant produces attractive flowers and seed heads but uses valuable nutrients to produce seed rather than prepare for next year's harvest. If self-sown seed does germinate, it'll be too close to the parent plant and will compete for nutrients. And if you're growing an F1 cultivar, for example Backlim F1, the next generation won't breed true to the parent.

Like its wild ancestor, cultivated asparagus has a complex root system. The wild asparagus you find along coastal Mediterranean hillsides grows in thin, rocky soil, so its roots need to dive deep into the rock for moisture and nutrients. The plant also has roots close to the surface to capture any available rain or dew. Fleshy asparagus roots, growing close to the surface, store moisture more efficiently than thin ones. This explains why an asparagus bed should be deep and fertile.

Only consider growing asparagus if you've plenty space. I recommend planting crowns 45cm apart in a row, with 90cm between rows.

Ideally, the bed should be double-dug the previous autumn. Dig out a row of soil in the bed and put it in a barrow. Fork over the soil underneath and mix in well-rotted manure or good compost. Cover this with soil from the second row and fork over the lower layer as before. Continue along the bed and add the soil from your barrow at the end of the bed. This should provide free-draining soil, essential for asparagus.

If you can obtain some rams' horns, you could follow the technique described by 17th-century agriculturalist John Worlidge: "Some curious persons put rams-horns at the bottom of the trench. They hold for certain that rams-horns have a certain sympathy with asparagus which makes them prosper the better." Alternatively, mix in hoof and horn fertiliser.

In March or early April, prepare the bed for asparagus crowns. Dig out a trench, 30cm deep, piling the soil to one side. Use good compost to make a shallow mound, 7cm high, along the middle of the trench. Lay the crowns along the mound, spreading the roots to each side of the mound. Gradually fill the trench with soil until full.

If planting one-year-old crowns, resist harvesting the following year; instead, reward yourself with a light picking in the third year. You can take a few spears the next year from two-year-old crowns. Keep the asparagus bed well fed every year by adding a thin layer of good compost in early spring. Add a generous sprinkling of seaweed meal to the bed when you stop cutting spears.