Wednesday 11 January 2012

Asparagus bed continued

The next stage in preparing the new bed for asparagus is to dig it out and generally improve the quality of the soil there. Normally I would just do a double-spit dig, but I have a secondary objective which is to get rid of this huge compost heap that has been lurking in the garden for a few years.

With a double-spit dig, you dig over the ground to two spade-depths, and incorporate compost and manure as you go. But the compost is coming from my heap, and all the good stuff is at the bottom. So if I incorporate it as I go along, the poor compost from the top of the heap will be at one end of the bed and the good stuff will be at the other. I need to spread it all evenly along the length of the bed, so I am digging the bed out as a trench.

Here it is, together with the compost heap that will be buried in it. It's about 2/3 done. I have put the topsoil on the right and the subsoil on the left. You can see that they are quite different colours: the topsoil contains much more organic matter and is a greyish colour, whereas the subsoil is reddish. To add organic matter to the subsoil, I will put the compost in the trench, shovel the subsoil on top and mix it all up with the rotovator. Hopefully this will make for a soil that is fertile to a much greater depth than before.

3 comments:

the fly in the web said...

We had two asparagus beds...one on heavy but well drained soil in a raised bed and the other in sandy soil on an island that used to catch silt in the floods. The latter did better most years.

Mark In Mayenne said...

Yes, I plan to add sand to the top layer, asparagus is supposed to greatly prefer sandy soils

Jonathan said...

There's an asparagus crown offer in the current Gardeners' World magazine if anyone is interested (this side of La Manche).

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