Autumn Asparagus Care

We’ve just fed our asparagus with their autumn feed of bone-meal and hand-weeded the bed which was a chance to lightly trowel the meal into the soil. Their roots are very shallow, so you can’t hoe the plants without risking damage. Because we only planted the crowns last year, we haven’t harvested any asparagus yet, but in the next week or so we’ll cut the foliage down to about two inches above the ground – at the moment it’s still green, so it’s still taking in nutrients but once it turns golden it won’t be feeding so it can be removed to avoid any winter wind damage.

We hope that next year we’ll be able to harvest our first stalks – which we’ll do when they are about six inches tall, and although we won’t get much from them in their first harvestable year, they do grow quickly so we’ll be cutting every third or fourth day.

We don’t have Asparagus Beetle, but because it has been seen on the site, we planted our crowns in a raised bed – we hope that we won’t get them either, although if we hand-pick the beetles off as soon as we see them, we should be okay. The important thing if you do get them is to cut down and burn any foliage in winter because the grubs overwinter either in the soil or in debris left around the base of the plant. We also have bottle waterers next to each crown so that we can water the roots of the plant without having to make the soil surface damp: this means that weed seeds that land on the surface get no extra encouragement to germinate because we never water the soil as a whole.

Labels: allotment-asparagus