So this year PFI is sponsoring an experiment on a few Iowa farms that grow asparagus. We're not one of those farms, but they've kindly provided us with the plans for the experiment, and since they sounded like a good idea, we decided to just use the experimental approach on all of our asparagus, in a "see how it works" experiment. I rototilled the top few inches of our entire asparagus bed, to break up the weeds there. That's why the bed looks pretty bare in the picture at right. We then densely planted soybeans, which should smother out the regrowth of weeds and act as hosts for nitrogen-fixing bacteria, to increase the fertility of our bed. We'll see how it works. The main interesting result so far is below, where it appears I knicked the growing point of the shoot, causing its confused spiral.