Parsnips Revisited

OK, I know there have been earlier threads on this wonderful vegetable (Yes, FarmerDill, I said wonderful! How can anyone not love parsnips?) and I can find lots of stuff with a Yahoo! search (sorry, I don't "Google"), but none of it addresses my wondering.

I know that common wisdom says to plant the seed in early Spring (although, if you go with the really "common" wisdom of "as soon as the soil can be worked", the seed tends to rot, contributing to its generally reputed low germination reputation). "Common" wisdom says the same about onion seed.

However, I get better results with both onion seeds and sets if I put them out in late Fall, at the same time I put out garlic and shallots. I have also had considerable luck with sowing turnips in late Fall to get an early harvest.

So, I am wondering: will this work with parsnips? Anyone tried it or have any good references?

Can you tell I am anxious to PLANT stuff, not just do Fall cleanup?

[By the way, for her birthday this week, I took my wife to a local auberge that features a somewhat "gourmet" twist on traditional French country fare, and there I had a main course of free-range baby porkchops served with julienned parsnips that had been braised in the "jus" from the pork. Parsnips are rich, so I could not finish the generous portion I received, but I brought them home! Even FarmerDill could not compare them to "mush"!]

Parsnips with porkchops sounds like a good combination.

I'm waiting for a hard frost to dig mine up. I had a gopher problem this year, some of the parsnips were eaten underground, and then the deer came through and took off the leaves. Maybe there is something left for me.

I remember seeing something on a gardening program about an unusual way to grow parsnips. A cement pipe about 2 feet in diameter was filled with good fluffy soil, and the parsnips were grown in it. The roots went more than 2 feet down and into the soil the pipe was sitting on. Very impressive. Sorry that I don't remember the method he used for starting the seeds. An alternative to your fall sowing might be to start them in little pots and transplant them. Do yours try to go to seed with the fall germination?

Last year I was incredibly late in my fall planting - really too late to be doing fall planting, but I so much wanted to just plant something that I did go ahead and sow extra seeds for rutabagas, parsnips and cornsalad. I think this was in mid to late October in zone 8.

The rutabagas, not surprisingly, didn't do really anything at all. However, the parsnips with a single layer of row cover (cultivators 'Cobham Improved Marrow' and 'Hollow Crown') and the cornsalad (cultivator 'Verte a Coeur Plein') did in fact germinate and for the course of the winter grew very slowly and stayed quite small.

Then come spring, both vegetable types grew extremely rapidly and I ended up with the largest parsnips I've so far grown. Since I've only done it once, I don't know whether planting them in the fall actually helped anything (aside from my gardening mentality) but it certainly didn't hurt and the resulting plants were very productive.

I don't know how much colder it is where you are, but it's worth a try.

~Amanda

It gets a fair bit colder here than it does out on Whidbey Island, Amanda (I used to live on Vashon), but your experience is encouraging! I have some new Hollow Crown and Tender & True seed that I could try. Thanks! The pipe idea also sounds good, as the soil would heat up nicely in the Spring!

It is a small world - we were looking at houses on Vashon before finding this one on Whidbey.

When I planted the parsnips I was living in the Auburn/Enumclaw area which is closer to the foothills (about forty-five minutes from Mt. Rainier), but we were still borderline zone 8 there.

It'll be interesting to hear how your parsnip experimentation turns out and I too am going to have to look around for some suitable pipes to experiment with.

~Amanda

Here in zone 5, winter gets too cold to overwinter most things. However, I have had good result germinating parsnip seed by waiting until May to plant (temps are rising above the 50's F but the ground is cool). I make sure to only cover the seed enough with fine sand to keep the birds from seeing it and water daily gently with a watering can by hand. I had read somewhere years ago that the seed does not tolerate drying out. In those years where I am consistent with the daily watering, I have had good germination.

Sources for those large concrete pipes would be construction sites where underground lines are being installed, or the big yards where they specialize in big concrete things. I got one many years ago that had chip in the rim so it was left at a construction site. It was a big job to rescue it, but it was free! Now I keep in mind how heavy one of these concrete things is, and consider plastic instead.

I am on Vashon Island (yep, small world!), zone 8b, and also had success with Fall sown parsnips. I had let a few parsnip plants from the previous year go to flower (spectacular) and then form seedheads which proceeded to self sow all over the garden. The result was a cover crop of parsnips in almost all my vegetable beds. I pulled some of them out in the Spring so I could plant other things. The rest matured into various sizes of parsnips from small to immense, I guess depending on how much sunlight they got during the growing season, or perhaps when the seed sprouted. I ended up with hundreds of parsnips to give away to friends. I quickly found out that there is a Great Parsnip Divide between those who like them and those who dislike (or even loathe) them. The only thing not so good about planting this late is that there will be lots of parsnips over the summer, but not so many for the Winter. I think I planted in late July one year to have parsnips of a good size to harvest in late Winter and early Spring.

I say go for it. Experimenting with the possibilities in your zone can be interesting and fun!

Oh, I am almost sorry I mentioned Vashon!
We took the ferry every day because Ms Marta worked in the City and I was a librarian in Bellevue. Every night, when we came home, we would spy our old cat by the side of the road. He would run beside us for a while, then dash off into the woods, only to appear nonchalantly at the front door, washing a paw.
He later lived with our son for a while, then traveled with us to Beijing, where he was forced (as we all were then) to live in unfriendly block apartments. And every evening, whichever of us came home first, would see his head sticking out under the balcony wall, crying to us.
He was our first pet in a long, pet-filled marriage,
We still miss him, and too much thought of Vashon calls him so vividly to mind, running those roads and woods we all loved.