The big question was this: How much can we eat without stressing the plants? The short answer is you can harvest one week for every year old your plants are for years 2-4.
Our plants are 2 years old, so we could harvest for two weeks. We harvested for one week, then had a hard frost, which froze things to the ground. I decided to let things go after that.
A hard frost will knock the asparagus back to the ground. Next year, I will harvest every spear before those nights, no matter how much we've cut already. We might as well eat it as let it die back to the ground.
The plants shot up during that hot week we had early in May and we have a lovely little forest of asparagus trees again this year. Claire planted cosmos in the middle of the bed - we thought the tall pink and white flowers would look nice later in the summer.
