What to Do With Overgrown Asparagus? Experts All Agree There Is Only 1 Solution – and It Benefits Your Crop Long-Term
Simply leave it alone; that is the fix
Asparagus needs to be picked regularly throughout the harvesting season. However, sometimes stems do get overgrown – it happens to the best of us. If you’ve missed a few days of picking or been away, you may see some tall asparagus in your patch. So what should you do?
When you grow asparagus, the sought-after tender spears are best picked at 6-8 inches tall during spring and early summer. Once stems reach 10 inches, they start to become woody and fibrous and are best left to complete their natural life cycle.
Can You Eat Tall Asparagus?
The season for harvesting asparagus is admittedly short. It runs for around six to eight weeks from mid-April to late June each year.
As you need to wait at least two years from planting asparagus crowns to picking the first stems, and the window itself is only small, you understandably want to enjoy as many stems as possible each year.
A perfect stem of asparagus should be 6-8 inches tall and larger than a pencil in diameter. During the harvesting season, cropping stems every few days is recommended to get them at their absolute best.
However, when they pass that peak condition and reach 10 inches or more, the quality of the stems diminishes. As Dominique Kline, Farm Director at The Hope Farm in Fairhope, Alabama, says: ‘Once asparagus has grown too tall to harvest, it becomes woody and fibrous.’
She adds to not cut it back, though, and we’ll explain why in more detail later.
So, can you eat tall asparagus? The answer kind of depends on the stem. If the tip of the stem is still closed and hasn’t started to develop sprouts, it can still be edible. However, older, thicker stems will be tough.
You could cut the stems and remove the thickest, lower sections, but the overarching advice from professionals is to leave the tall asparagus.
Dominique Kline is the Farm Director at Deep Roots Restaurant Group’s The Hope Farm in Fairhope, Alabama. At The Hope Farm, Dominique oversees the property’s hydroponic gardens, raised beds, and edible landscape, supplying the kitchen with fresh ingredients daily.
What to Do With Overgrown Asparagus
If overgrown, tall, woody asparagus is no good for dinner plates, what is the best way to deal with it? The answer is to do nothing and leave the stems alone.
The advice to not cut the stems, as touched upon earlier, is echoed by Kate Russell, an experienced grower and author of Stop Wasting Your Yard!, who says: ‘Once asparagus has grown beyond the harvesting stage, it is best to leave it alone and let it go through its normal life cycle.’
This natural cycle will involve continuing to grow throughout the summer and developing into tall and feathery asparagus ferns.
Dominique Kline reassures that although the ferns may look ‘unkempt’ in a vegetable garden, they are important. She says: ‘The ferns play a critical role in providing the roots with enough energy to survive the winter and produce in the following years.’
Kate Russell adds that allowing asparagus to continue growing in this way supports stronger plants and ‘will result in better crops in the future’.
The message is clear: if you want healthier asparagus, productive crowns, and a better harvest next year, allow plants to fern out and complete their life cycle.
While that includes leaving tall asparagus alone, it also means waiting until the right time of year to cut back asparagus. That is when the fern foliage dies back naturally.
This is a task I have tended to do in winter, while Dominique says she doesn’t cut the ferns back until they are ‘fully dried’ in late winter or early spring.
Another bonus of letting the asparagus plant produce its ferns is that they feed wildlife in your garden. ‘The plants produce small berries that some birds enjoy,’ says Kate.
Kate Russell helps others make the most of a landscape by incorporating delicious, attractive edible plants. She is the author of 'Stop Wasting Your Yard!', available at Amazon, and owner of The Daily Garden gardening blog.
How to Prevent Tall Asparagus
Tall asparagus can happen all too easily, and it has happened to all gardeners, including me. It occurs because asparagus grows very quickly after the stems first start showing through the soil in spring.
In warm temperatures, these growth spurts accelerate. It means very regular monitoring is needed to get spears at the ideal size. ‘It only takes a few days of missed harvests for spears to overgrow and become too tall,’ admits Dominique.
For the best harvest of this delectable and prolific perennial vegetable, the expert grower recommends ‘daily monitoring’ for spears of a reasonable size, which encourages the plant to continue producing more spears to pick.
'Mary Washington' is an heirloom variety with heavy yields of dark green spears. You can either plant bare root crowns or grow the variety from seed (with some patience).
A set of 10 bare-root 'Jersey Knight' asparagus crowns to add to a vegetable garden. It is a male hybrid asparagus that is resistant to diseases, including root and crown rot.
Harvest asparagus with a sharp knife 1-2 inches under the soil surface. This harvesting knife has a flat tip for push cuts and a serrated blade for cutting thicker stems.
Asparagus crowns can remain productive for twenty years in ideal conditions. To keep your crowns in top condition, fertilize asparagus in late winter or early spring, just before new growth emerges, with a balanced, slow-release, all-purpose fertilizer. A product like this organic 5-5-5 fertilizer at Amazon is ideal for the task. It will give the crowns essential nutrients to produce lots of spears and healthy ferns that year.
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