Hi everyone. we bought this house last August and it came with 3 raised beds. a strawberry patch and a big old asparagus "tree":)
First picture shows the start of the day and the rest shows what I was able to clear by the end. (There's WAY more to do, of course.)
I used bungee cables to scoop up the ferns and hook them on the stake. Since we haven't landscaped how we want the back yard to look, I am planning on making this area look beautiful and actually use the beds for food and flowers.
I want to make the asparagus a beautiful focal point. what do you use to cage it upwards and off the ground? If I can't I'm going to dig it up and put something else there.
Any help would be appreciated.
by Feeling_Employer_899
2 Comments
I think your asparagus looks gorgeous and I am jealous! It would be kind of tragic to kill mature asparagus like that. If you do go that route, someone would almost certainly want/take the root system. (crowns)
Real answer though, Part of the problem might be that it probably wasn’t harvested any in the spring. If you pick it for a month or two in the spring it won’t be so out of control. Putting a post in each corner and stringing around it is more along the lines of how I control mine (its in rows though) but whether it will ever meet your aesthetic goals is something only you can answer. I think the ferns are very beautiful myself but frankly I have never had asparagus that big heh. If you keep it trained up from the start and it never falls over it will look better then it does in pictures after you picked it up.
Pick the new shoots hard for a year though and see. Hopefully someone in a more similar climate weighs in because in my climate it dies back completely every year but it seems like that is maybe how it looks right now in spring? Which is wild to me….
Assuming that’s actual asparagus, one would generally cut down the ferns once they die. I’m in the PNW, and the die back usually happens in the fall. In the spring, new shoots pop up and I harvest for a number of weeks and then let the smaller stalks fern out like this.
But in no way do I try to nurse the ferns along past the end of the growing season.