Last spring, we rebuilt half of the garden by taking out the old wooden raised beds and replacing them with metal ones. This spring, we replaced the other half. I'll be posting about that soon. Moving the tons of dirt from the old beds into the new ones was a lot of work, but the real chore, in my opinion, was digging out the asparagus bed.
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| The "old" asparagus bed behind the Three Sisters bed. |
Back in March, I tried to get the process started by digging up the asparagus while it was still dormant. At that time, I found that the ground was still frozen, so I couldn't do any digging. At least, that's what I thought. The ground certain still had some ice in it, but when I went back to try again after it had warmed up considerably, I still found it very hard to dig.
Over the winter, I had researched how to relocate an asparagus bed. I read that it was a delicate process to remove the fragile roots and crowns and that I needed to be gentle with them. With that in mind, I carefully began the extraction. The gentle approach got me nowhere. I could barely get the tines of my garden fork into the earth. So, I got out a shovel and began to tentative probe the soil to loosen it around roots. When my husband found me jumping on the shovel like a pogo stick he suggested getting out an ax. I chuckled and allowed him to take over for a bit. Finally, he was able to remove an asparagus crown.
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| You've heard of the Flying Spaghetti Monster... |
One of the first things we planted in our brand-new garden some 10 years was the asparagus bed. I guess after that long, the tiny, delicate asparagus crowns had turned to hulking beasts. That would explain the difficulty digging and maybe why some of the asparagus spears last year were somewhat malformed. I assumed that had been insects but it might have been the result of intense overcrowding.It ended up taking more than a month to fully remove all the asparagus from the old bed. I strained by back while working on it and my husband's attention was on moving soil to the new beds. By the time we had hauled all the bits of asparagus out of its 1-foot by 11-foot bed, I was, frankly, tired of it.
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| One of the newer 3'x6' beds temporarily held all the dug-up asparagus. |
For a couple days, I considered just dumping the load at the back of our property and letting it fend for itself. But then I noticed the tiny green spears reaching out of the mass of twisted roots.
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| Life will find a way. |
I couldn't just exile the asparagus when it was doing its best to keep going. So, I went to work digging a new, larger bed outside of the garden proper. The digging started out easily enough. Removing the first layer of turf was actually kind of fun. Then I got into the rocks. There were so many rocks. I have vowed that the next place we live will have soil free of rocks. By the time I get over the last move, however, and actually want to move again, I'll likely be too old to dig a hole anyway.
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| That's going to have to be good enough. |
After heaving the dug-up asparagus "crowns" over the garden fence rather than carrying them all the way out through the gate, I laid them into the hole. I probably should have used fewer of them or made a larger bed but I didn't have the heart or the energy to do either.
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| Sorry, they're just going to have to figure it out. |
I had to shake out the turf in order to recover enough soil to completely cover the asparagus in its new home but it all seemed to work out. |
| All done! |
Now, almost a month later, the asparagus has put up new spears. There aren't a lot but it proves that at least some of them survived the violent, haphazard transplanting.
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| Hey, maybe this will actually work! |
You may notice in the photo that many of the spears appear to be broken off. They were bitten off, more likely. I didn't think that deer ate asparagus, but they do seem to like to sample nearly everything we try to grow around here. I've just decided to shrug and late nature take its course.
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| Was it only the fence keeping the deer from devastating our asparagus crop? |
