OLD-FASHIONED COMPANION PLANTING

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Then, I go down the rows and lightly rake old mulch and dead berry plant leaves off of the alternate rows that contain the new-generation strawberry plants and mound it over the old plant rows. Then I till it in very well (old berry plants and all) or (better) burn it and then till. A good sprinkling of composted manure mixed with soiled stable bedding goes on the fruiting bed. Finally, over the whole plot, I scatter six inches of loose salt hay, a type of grass that is harvested from coastal salt marshes, so it lacks inland weed seeds. It is expensive inland but you can use wheat or rye straw. Don't mulch with regular hay unless it is old and half rotten. New hay is full of weed seed and will turn your asparagus bed to what we call a "hay-mowing" here in New England. Lacking a natural mulch, the asparagus bed is one place I'd recommend spending the money for ground peanut shells, corncobs, shredded bark, or other organic mulch.

The asparagus and new berry crowns will push right up through your mulch in the spring, and it will keep the new berries away from soil-borne rots. Be sure to sprinkle on limestone some time during the year to neutralize the acid content of mulch as it rots down, bark especially. To spread out the harvest, you can pull mulch away from crowns of half the strawberry plants as soon in the spring as you can. Sun will warm the soil and those plants will fruit a few days earlier than the rest.

During the fall overhaul, I also pull out and compost old horseradish and rhubarb leaves and scatter any leftover compost or manure over the dormant crowns. But I'm sure to be careful of next year's rhubarb buds that often break the soil in fall. Then it's just a matter of waiting out the winter, confident that, in a carefully prepared bed, and after judicious harvest and good fall "putting to bed," the asparagus, strawberry, rhubarb, and new horseradish roots are preparing to gift us with a bountiful harvest next year.

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