Any advice about gophers and asparagus?

Even if they don't like it to eat, they'll still tear it up tunneling. Best long term solution is to try to get some hardware cloth on the bottom. If you don't want to/can't do that, then you have to stay on top of trying to trap them. These cinch traps are amazing. If you decide to go this route, make sure you order the mole traps linked - their gopher traps are for eastern gophers and are too large to catch our pocket gophers.

You'll have to keep trapping until you aren't catching any more or seeing any more mounds. You will have to keep an eye out though, I've heard those tunnels can run for miles, and I know for a fact eventually more gophers will move into the vacant ones. We'll be gopher-free for a couple of years and then get an invasion we have to knock back down. Which is why, long term, the hardware cloth is the easiest solution.

I will admit I have no experience with gophers but I question the merits of the hardware cloth. What is to keep gophers from tunneling shallow or even from having borrowes elsewhere and coming into the asparagus bed to just feed?

Barrie, hardware cloth is generally used on the bottom of some type of raised bed with actual sides made out of wood or some other material. The gophers then can't tunnel in from the sides or bottom. Pocket gophers specifically (which is what we have out west) either cannot or will not climb, so if you have your raised bed above ground by probably about 6", they won't come in from the top, either.

Yes. It's a raised bed that we may have to have emptied out, hardware clothed and re-filled in order to plant some asparagus. Nancy