Beginner Gardening: Asparagus growing/harvesting, 1 by jkehl

jkehl wrote:
My asparagus bed is pretty similar to yours, I put in about 30 roots in the Fall/Winter of 2006. This spring I ate a bunch of asparagus for about 2 weeks and have just been letting it grow since then.

The rule I used was to take any sprouts that were bigger than a pencil. After the two weeks, the sprouts started to get noticeably smaller so I stopped harvesting. Just today I noticed several sprouts that are the diameter of a quarter or so which I could probably eat but I went ahead and left those too.

Some things I've read say that the harvesting is good because it spurs additional growth when you cut the growing point (much like pruning the top off a plant to make it bush out). But you don't want to cut so much off that you sap the plant's growth.

So it's a bit of a balancing act and keep in mind that most advice on growing Asparagus is probably written by someone from the north that can only envy the long growing season you have in Savannah.

Jeff