How to Plant Asparagus in a Landscape Bed Video

Gurney's horticulture expert Felix plants an asparagus crown for landscaping, detailing the process of soil preparation and planting. Asparagus, with its beautiful, fine textured ferny leaves are a wonderful sight at the back, and even the midst of your flower beds.

Hi everyone, Felix here with Gurney's and today we're covering asparagus and using it in the landscape instead of the vegetable garden. Asparagus, after the harvest season, has a really nice ferny leaf that is a soft texture in the garden, green color, and it's quite attractive as a backdrop for a lot of plants in the mid to back of the bed. And our planting site today has some leaf compost, little leaves from the fall that are in place, we're going to clear that away, we're going to dig our hole about six to eight inches deep and we're going to add a little bit of super phosphate or triple phosphate, depending on what you have available. In this case, we're going to use triple phosphate, has a little bit of a kick for the plant to get started and we'll cover that after I clear away this mulch. Alright, so right now, I've cleared away the mulch and got a piece of cardboard here, because it helps to keep the good soil that's at the base of the hole from being in all of the leaf litter of the mulch in your bed and when you put that around your asparagus crown, it's nice and clean. Okay, so I've made just a little bit of a mound at the bottom of the hole so these roots spread out over it. We're going to place the crown in, let the roots fan out, like so. And I have a little bit of compost, it's a nice rich compost from the compost bin and I'm going to add--asparagus really likes a rich soil, and I also have a little super phosphate and I'm going to add about a handful of that around the base--and this won't burn the roots, so you can add that directly in and then I'll continue to add the soil from the planting ball back in around the roots. Now a lot of planting guides will tell you just to cover a couple of inches over the crown, but from all of our trials, that's really not necessary. You can go ahead and cover the asparagus crown all the way to the soil line, like that and it'll push up fine. The only thing that would be a problem is if this crusts over heavily. With this kind of soil, we're not going to run into that issue. You do have a crust in more clay oriented soil, you might come through and cultivate a little bit so it doesn't have that crusty surface to break through, that spear when it initiates out of the soil. So the only other step here is to water the scene...we're actually expecting a little bit of rain this evening, so I'm not going to have to do that in this case, but if tomorrow we didn't get some rain, of course, I'll come out here and water it in. Thanks very much for joining us and we'll show you a little later in the video, that Asperger's fan coming up, and you can see how that works well with this chocolate mimosa that we have on this ornamental planting site.