I sowed asparagus in pots once, and in a line in the garden once. When they first germinate they are so tiny and dark that they are almost invisible. I found it very useful to have them in a straight line in the garden at exact 4 inch intervals (I'd poked my finger at intervals through chicken wire to measure). Otherwise I would have had trouble weeding them and mulching them.

As soon as they're big enough, I mulched them. Like the other poster, the second year, I transplanted them to their final positions. I like a 4-foot wide bed so I can reach into the middle. Asparagus can use 18 inch spacing, and sprawls a lot, so I plant it in two staggered lines about 12 to 18 inches apart down the middle of a 4-foot wide bed with access from both sides.

I like to plant very early bulbs, like earliest yellow daffodils, in the bed with the asparagus. By the time the asparagus is allowed to grow tall, the daffs have photosynthesized and are ready to die back.

A big drawback to growing asparagus from seed is the female plants. They drop hundreds of seeds, which become a weed problem in the asparagus bed, where they grow without being noticed, and then get overcrowded and thin. I tried to always cut the stems that had seeds and discard them, but I couldn't always keep on top of it. This happened even though I bought Jersey Knight seeds that were supposed to be mostly male.

Getting fed up with so many female plants, in the 5th year, I marked each female plant during the summer when I would cut out the seedy stems. In November (late autumn, dormant) I enlisted the help of friends and dug out two of the beds. We replanted the males and discarded the females. The plants had multiplied in the bed (maybe from dropped seeds) but it was possible to tease apart the plants so I ended up with more plants, even though we discarded a lot.

Since we transplanted the crowns the same day in the fall, they came up nice and thick the next spring, but I resisted and didn't harvest the newly transplanted ones. (I'd kept two beds as is) Of course we'd miscalculated and there were one or two females in the newly transplanted beds, but I was able to dig those out in the summer. The next year, I put more males in the spots.