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After the quick but sweet harvest in May and June you will have been leaving them to luxuriate in a reasonably haze of ferny foliage.

This ought to be beginning to turn brown now, so that you can help your asparagus store energy for next year’s crop, you need to curb the stems now.

Wear thick gardening gloves to guard you from thorns at the stems and shear them off at ground level.

Then pull out any weeds – don’t use a hoe because asparagus roots are so near the outside – and spread garden compost excessive to behave as a mulch to avoid more weeds growing and to feed the soil for next year’s asparagus shoots.

Don’t forget that in the event you planted F1 cultivars this year it is possible for you to to reap the shoots next May. The other kind of asparagus planted this year still needs another year without being harvested before you can begin eating them.

And in the event you didn’t have time to plant asparagus this year, now’s a great time to organize the soil for an asparagus bed next year, by digging in a number of garden compost or rotted manure.

You can plant one-year-old asparagus crowns next February, March and April, or sow seeds in pots of compost in late winter.

It is healthier to soak the seeds overnight before planting them in yogurt pot-sized modules, then plant them out into the prepared bed next spring.

Don’t forget, though, you can’t harvest asparagus until its third year, unless they’re F1 cultivars!