Putting the Asparagus to bed

(Before It's News)

Latest post from MARKSVEGPLOT – a blog about food and gardening in England”

‘Tis done. The cutting of the Asparagus fern, that is. It has gone from this…

To this…

I have left the “stubble” a bit longer than normal, so that I can be sure I know exactly where each plant is. I am gradually replacing my old raised beds with new, much sturdier ones, and the Asparagus bed is due for replacement next Spring. My intention is to try to transplant the best of the plants, like this one for instance, which put up a lot of spears. Bear in mind that what you see here is only the ones I didn’t harvest.

I’m not sure whether this one will make the cut. Individually the spears it produced were fine (amongst the biggest, in fact), but there weren’t many of them.

In a similar vein… At the weekend I did, as promised, collect-up some of the fallen leaves in my garden, but not as many as I had hoped. The leaf-sucker / blower contraption doesn’t perform very well unless the leaves are completely dry – which they weren’t. After stopping about half-a-dozen times to unclog the machine, I gave up on it and did some of the task by hand. It was hard work and I didn’t have the energy (or willpower) to do much. Furthermore the hand-gathered leaves didn’t get chopped up like the machine-gathered ones, so they wouldn’t be so good for composting. Whole leaves break down an awful lot more slowly than shredded ones! I now have three big sacks of leaves in the garage. Any takers?

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