Complimentary Blueberry Juice

After trying for 4 years or so, I think I’m finally giving up on this one.

The general problem with the Parsnips is that they anchor themselves into our clay soil and are nearly impossible to dig. I’ve also noticed they send out enormous side shoots, which I thought anchored them even further. Luckily I was growing the open-pollinated Hollow Crown, and many were short and stumpy, the broad fork would pull up enough that I could say “I grew Parsnips successfully.”

But truthfully they took enormous amounts of time and frustration, broken broad fork handles and pitchforks. The Parsnips would break or be damaged by the fork.

Parsnips are very much unlike Carrots. With Carrots, there are fine root hairs that colonize all parts of the soil, breaking it apart and creating amazing aggregates that crumble when you fork them out. And more importantly the tools go under and below the carrot, lifting them up. With Parsnips, there are no such fine root hairs creating aggregates and the forks intersect with the main root, which anchors itself in as if the Parsnip is planning to stay forever.

Actually I think maybe the Parsnips do want to stay forever.

So for this year, I thought I would give it one more go, the main problems to address being: 1) making sure it was in a good fluffy well-developed bed, and 2) changing the variety to an F1, Albion.

The good news is that Albion is amazing and the Parsnips are absolutely perfect. They are a great size, consistent, uniform and most importantly for me, they do not have the side anchor roots like the Hollow Crown.

The bad news is we dug about 8 of them before we gave up, broke a broad fork, decided to escalate matters and get the under cutter on the compact tractor and….yes, the Parsnips stopped the tractor.

We did manage to pull one out and it measured a whopping 17″.

That’s 17″ down into Red River gumbo clay, these things are not going anywhere. It is easier to visualize how the forks bring up blocky, bricks of clay and the Parsnip doesn’t budge.

So I’ve got 300 feet of Parsnips anchored down like piles for a house, all ready to sprout up next year and go to seed. How I’m going to deal with that I haven’t decided yet…

…one more Hail Mary for this season, to hope it dries up a lot, and that the dry clay will be easier to fracture and extract the Parsnips.

Not holding my breath on that one and, for now, unless I can come up with a better idea of how to grow these, I’m going to have to take the L on Parsnips and move on. They’re an extremely tough crop in this area and I’m just not willing to spend a week digging them (only to break half of them in the process), which is obviously bad enough for economic reasons, but mostly to preserve my sanity.

If anyone has techniques for extracting these out of clay without a back hoe, let me know.

Graham

thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice