Asparagus Fern
Asparagus setaceus
Not a fern at all — fine, feathery growth that wants humid air and never quite forgives a dry week.
- Type
- Houseplant · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Green
- Sunlight
- Bright, indirect light throughout.
- Watering
- Keep it evenly moist — damp, never sodden.
- Feeding
- Feed once a month through spring and summer.
- Frost tolerant
- No
- Pruning
- Cut out yellowed and dead fronds whenever they appear.
- Mar–Dec Spring Growth
- Jan–Mar Spring Growth
- Plant spacing
- 23.6 in
- In-row spacing
- 23.6 in
- Between rows
- 2 ft 6 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- Swollen storage roots
- Working depth
- 8–20 in
- Can reach
- 3 ft down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 24 in–3 ft across, about 1–1.5× the width of the plant
- Shallowest pot
- 14 in of soil
The fat roots are the larder and the thin ones do the feeding. Lift them or mulch them deeply where the ground freezes hard, and handle them by the crown: a snapped storage root rots rather than heals.
Fat white water-storing tubers that will crack a plastic pot and lift the whole plant out of a clay one. Repot it every couple of years, and cut the root ball in half with a bread knife when you do.
The habit is Asparagus Fern’s own; the figures are what that habit usually comes to at this size, not a measurement of this species. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
Beneficial predators that hunt this plant's pests — grow their favourite flowers nearby to recruit them. companion plant
- Ladybird (lady beetle) Coccinellidae
The gardener’s favorite ally: adults and their alligator-shaped larvae each eat thousands of aphids, plus scale, mealybugs, and other soft-bodied sap-suckers. Grow flat, open flowers for the adults and never spray a colony that ladybird larvae are already working.
- Green lacewing Chrysoperla carnea
Its bristly larvae — "aphid lions" — impale aphids, mealybugs, thrips, and mite colonies, eating hundreds a week. Adults feed on nectar and pollen from small open flowers and overwinter in hollow stems left standing.
- Hoverfly Syrphidae
Bee-mimicking flies whose legless larvae graze aphid colonies clean while the adults pollinate. A ribbon of shallow, nectar-rich flowers kept in bloom all season recruits wave after wave of them.
- Big-eyed bug Geocoris spp.Hunts Spider mites
A stubby 3 mm bug with enormous wrap-around eyes, working the soil surface and the low foliage for aphids, mites, thrips and insect eggs. It is the main natural check on chinch bugs in a lawn and it is killed outright by insecticide.
- Minute pirate bug Orius spp.Hunts Spider mites
A pinhead-sized true bug that is the best natural check on thrips, and happily spears aphids, mites, and insect eggs too. It needs pollen when prey is scarce, so keep something flowering nearby.
- Predatory mites Phytoseiulus & AmblyseiusHunts Spider mites
Fast orange mites that hunt spider mites egg-by-egg, and cousins that clear thrips and fungus-gnat larvae. Sold as a biological control for greenhouses; outdoors they follow humidity — mist and mulch, don’t dust with sulfur.
- Rove beetle StaphylinidaeHunts Spider mites
Slim, quick beetles with short wing cases that hunt in soil and litter, taking root-fly eggs and larvae, fungus-gnat larvae, and mites. Mulch and undisturbed ground keep them resident year-round.
Houseplants, like this one.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com