How to grow asparagus - jobs for winter

G'day, welcome to iCultivate, my name's Steve. Going back about two, three years ago we put in some asparagus crowns into this garden bed here. Today we're going to look at how we look after these during the winter. Now people have often asked me about whether their asparagus has died but you can see here what has actually happened with the asparagus is that the asparagus ferns or the fronds have died back during winter. Now this is what asparagus will do every year. It will grow from the crown and eventually what will happen is it will then die back during the winter. Now it's during winter that you should do a number of things. Now let's have a look at what that is. Now the first thing I'm going to do is actually trim down or remove all of these dead ferns. Now I do remember someone saying to me once that they actually just put their lawnmower over their entire asparagus bed each winter. I'm not recommending that but you can just simply either trim them down with hedges or with pruners or these dead fronds will actually quite simply just pull out. So you can pull them out or you can just trim them down. Now I've removed all of the dead fronds from the garden bed and I'm now going to put these into our compost bin. Now I think it's important that we understand what is going on with our asparagus before I go on to the next step. Under the ground we have our asparagus crowns. Now we planted those a couple of years ago. Those crowns during the growing season are actually growing the green fronds up. Those fronds are photosynthesising and that photosynthesis is providing the sugars and the energy that the crown needs for growth. Now what happens then of course is during the winter they die back. So what we're going to have soon as we go into spring is those asparagus spears starting to emerge. In other words the asparagus crown goes into growth phase again. Now growth is going to require a lot of nutrients so therefore what we're going to do now is feed the asparagus crowns. So even though we cannot see any asparagus spears here right at the moment, even though it appears that there is not actually any growth going on, it's going to be soon and it's going to need nutrients for that. So I'm going to first of all add over our asparagus bed some blood and bone. The next thing I'm going to add is a good healthy layer of compost. Now this particular compost is mushroom compost. It doesn't matter, there's lots of nutrients in this mushroom compost. There's another video online that I'll put a link to that tells you all about mushroom compost but the important thing is is that we get this layer of compost on top of the asparagus bed to provide all of those nutrients that the asparagus crowns require during their growing spurt. So the last thing that I'm going to do here is put a layer of mulch over the top. The reason for this is to help with moisture retention in the soil. The last thing we want is for our asparagus, particularly during the growing season, to dry out. The soil is well draining so it won't be too wet but we do want it to retain a certain amount of moisture, therefore mulch. So we finish up by watering this down and allowing it to all settle down into place. One last thing, people have asked why we have this fence along the side. Well we have put our asparagus garden into the back of a retaining wall so as it grows of course the fronds then all fall over. So this little fence here is really nothing more than just simply keeping the fronds all under control when they grow, stopping them from falling over the side of the retaining wall. Now we'll come back later in the spring and I will show you the benefits of what we have done as we start to harvest these beautiful asparagus spears. So I hope you've enjoyed this video, can I please ask you to go down to the thumbs up and give us a thumbs up, subscribe to this channel and go to our website iCultivate.net and become a member of the community. Thanks for watching.