It wasn't the best harvest season for my little asparagus plot this year.
It's been five years since I put that rootstock into the soil of a four by six bed, and I've been tending and feeding it ever since. The first two years I just let the bed run, tall sprawling ferns rising taller than I. For the last three, I've taken the first month of growth, a modest yield of tasty spears to begin the spring growing season.
This year, the weather has wildly oscillated, and the asparagus got a little caught out. Two weeks of summer-warm heat back in April started the spring growth cranking, but things suddenly shifted back to near freezing many nights. The surge which began with the ferocity of an advancing phalanx petered out to near nothing, with yields significantly below the prior two years.
After four weeks of harvesting a small handful a day, I decided to call it. I didn't want to strain the roots, pushing those plants to the point where I was actually harming them with my picking. Like all living things, asparagus officinalis needs rest, needs a time of Sabbath from the demands of production. If you take and take and take and take, what you end up with a dead plot the next year.
There's a metaphor in there for our compulsive busyness, I think.
So I let the ferns grow, and set about building a structure around the bed to support their growth. I've done this in prior years, as I realized that those six foot plus ferns weren't exactly stable. As they leaned to the south to catch the light of the sun, they'd flop down onto neighboring beds, or collapse during high wind events.
The structure is made entirely of the growth of my garden, as I take the dried stalks of last year's sunflowers, a roll of garden twine, and with a little snipping and securing, hey presto, I've got a structural cage for asparagus. They're stablised, protected from the wind and errant lawnmowers.
I suppose the next step would be to add a movable protective cover, to shield those delicate ferns in the event we get significant hail.
As every gardener knows, it's important to have an awning for the cage of asparagus.
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