A picture from my garden in springtime:

It seems I never wrote last summer about how I had to prune my asparagus early. I didn’t have time, because of how that project consumed me. The same phenomenon is forcing me to do it again this year: an infestation of aphids in the thick jungle of fronds. Last week I saw a few ladybugs on the plants, and thought, Oh, no, I bet it’s happening again. I looked more closely, but the invasion wasn’t obviously imminent.

Then today, as I was trimming the irises, I noticed that some of their leaves had the sticky “honeydew” sign of aphids. That’s exactly what I was doing last year when, as today, I looked up at the asparagus fronds bouncing off my head — Why oh why hadn’t I worn a hat? — and saw the shiny mess everywhere. I had taken a lot of pictures last year (including two I’m posting now), but never got around to sharing anything of that experience; there were immensely more pleasant things to tell about.

Searching online, I did not discover any tricks to prevent this happening every year, though I did learn that much of California is so mild that aphids are a problem with many crops; there are aphids specific to many plants, a fact I didn’t know before. Maybe I have the European Asparagus Aphids.

A single adult ladybug can eat up to 50 aphids per day, and the ones that arrived in my garden this month have feasted well, but they can’t keep up. One is supposed to wait to prune asparagus after cold weather makes the fronds turn brown, so that they have as long as possible to carry on photosynthesis. But if aphids are destroying them anyway, not much is lost by doing it early.

Jacques the Gardener in San Diego shows in his video how he had the same problem I do, in his much smaller plot, and his reasoning about having to cut down the plants months before the usual time helped me to feel better about doing the same. Last year there were so many mild-weather months remaining after I removed the decimated fronds, a whole new crop of them sprouted, which I knew would start over the process of turning the fall sunshine into food for the crowns. Eventually they had to be cut off also. My spring crop following all that was pretty good this year, but it’s possible that a continued aphid plague will weaken the plants.

Today, I only cut off a few of the stalks, to clear the way for me to finish cleaning up the irises. In the process aphids and aphid carcasses drifted down on my hair and clothes. In the next couple of months I’m dividing and replanting the irises and changing things around in that area, so I think after cutting all the asparagus to the ground I’ll take the mulch off the whole space as well and start with fresh everything. I hope that might reduce next year’s aphid population a little.

In the meantime, I will close with a more positive visual reminder of why I do all this work: