It’s been a long Parsnip journey and this “ending” does not seem anti-climactic at all (because it isn’t quite over yet, there’s going to be a sequel!) I’m super excited to have finally successfully grown parsnips. Long time readers of this here Complimentary Blueberry Juice will have read about the trials and tribulations and many failures of growing Parsnips over the past few years.
Without further ado, here they are!
They just popped out of the ground with a gentle pull! I remember spending several hours to broadfork out a whole bed, and breaking the tools, breaking parsnips, and it overall being an unpleasant experience. What a total joy it is to just pull them in a single second!
I’m hoping that I can market these and that their unfamiliar shape is not much of a deal breaker…are people really attached to how a vegetable appears? I’m thinking with one taste of these any hesitations will be dispelled. Plus with a little education of just how nearly impossible it is to grow parsnips in Manitoba clay without breaking broadforks, pitchforks, or stopping a 36 horsepower tractor pulling an undercutter dead in its tracks, it might take a year or two, but we’ll all get used to our fresh local Parsnips looking like this.
This heirloom variety is an absolute winner in my books.
I’m mostly glad I didn’t give up on Parsnips and, after numerous times having them locked up in the clay and impossible to harvest, I ditched the idea that it was possible to grow them in a similar fashion as to how carrots can grow in a no-till bed system on clay. After a lot of searching for a seed source for this rather rare variety, there’s no way I’m not growing these every season from now on.
My only issue with them this season was that I was a bit late to finish thinning out the whole bed, so some of them didn’t size up quite as nicely as the ones in the photo.
The big lesson from this Parsnip journey is that there are a lot of options out there that do not make it to a seed catalog from a big company. There are a lot of genetics out there that have not been optimized for big agriculture, shipping, or some other modern metric. In this case there existed a parsnip that can grow as a root bulb instead of like a carrot. What the history of these particular genetics is I don’t know, but it is something I’ll try to look into over the winter and see what I can find.
And there’s the sequel to this saga: the next step is to begin the process of saving my own seeds such that I can have Kral Parsnips in abundance forever. They are a biennial crop, which means they only set seed on the second year. I’ll be saving some percentage of this crop to plant them as bulbs again next springtime and waiting for them to go to seed in 2027.
I’m not really a seed saver at the moment, it’s always been something I was interested in but, as our farm mostly grows hybrid varieties, in a lot of cases it’s not feasible. The few vegetables that we do grow that are heirloom types are available easily from many suppliers in quantity.
These however, are a little hard to track down. And so for that reason, I’ll be making sure I can plant these year after year.
Graham
thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice
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