This is the first year I’ve tried to grow parsnips, and it was not planned. They went were something else had failed.
They grew incredibly well – at least from what we could see. Huge greenery that got so tall, it grew through the higher raised bed cover we had on this bed, because it’s strong enough to hold protective plastic or netting, plus the weight of cats. For the past while, it was just the wire, nothing else, to keep cats out in general. Once I removed that, not long ago, in preparation for harvesting, the parsnip greens were so tall, the stems on the outside flopped over and couldn’t hold themselves up without the wire.
What I couldn’t see was parsnips.
I had tried probing around the surface of the soil, but could neither see nor feel any roots. I tried pulling some up at one end, some time ago, and there was basically nothing. I was prepared to have a whole lot of paltry roots of the sort I see when carrots or radishes bolt, though no parsnips bolted.
With Thanksgiving dinner happening tomorrow, as I was covering the self seeded tomatoes for the night, I decided to try and harvest some parsnips to go with the carrots my daughter was digging up. She had the garden fork, and the spades are all by the haskaps, so I tried with the flat blade of the ice chipper, first, thinking to loosen the soil beside the parsnips so I could pull them without just tearing the greens right off.
The first thing I noted was there was definitely something there. Not near the surface at all, though. I ended up switching to the tines of an old garden fork that the handle had broken off long ago. We meant to get a new handle and simply forgot. I found it while cleaning up around the house in preparation for winter. The lack of a handle actually came in handy in a raised bed.
It worked much better, though I found I still couldn’t get deep enough!
Yes, we got parsnips!
You can see a couple with tips that broke off because they were deeper than I’d been able to loosen the soil, as well as some surface damage from the tines. The soil surface was about an inch above the tops of the roots. No wonder we couldn’t see them!
I wonder if I’ll find the same thing when we start digging up the beets, growing in the same bed?
This is all I picked for today. Parsnips and carrots can both handle frost, so there’s no hurry to harvest them all. Same with the bunching onions we also picked, to go with our Thanksgiving meal tomorrow. I forgot to take the turkey out early enough to thaw, so we’re going to have a pork roast, instead. 😄
All this was done after we did a little stock up trip at Walmart, since we weren’t up to doing Costco, while recovering from colds, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving! We will just make sure to do it on Tuesday. Wednesday at the latest, since my daughter and I will be spending Thursday night at my brothers before my surgery in the city on Friday morning.
We need to be pretty organized ahead of time.
We were starting to run out of things, though, so the Walmart trip had to be done today, if only it the smaller one that’s closer.
Stock up post, coming up, next!
The Re-Farmer
