I‘ve dug out the plot. It seemed about time considering we’ve now started off this year’s crops in the greenhouse. A little bit of warm weather, some watering and a bit of shooting, and they’ll be ready for transplanting.
So I pulled back the little polytunnel which has succeeded in propagating nothing but clover and hooked out all of the weeds. Then I rather gingerly moved on to the nettles that had taken over the parsnip runs.
Cue the surprising discovery. In among the nettles were the last of last year’s unharvested parsnips. I didn’t hold out much hope for them: they’ve been in the ground through the worst of the winter weather and I expected to find them comprehensively drilled by the slugs’ hungry mouths.
But not a bit of it. I could tell they were big when I started forking them out of the ground as they simply didn’t want to budge. When I did manage to dislodge them, though, they were monsters. The longest was a good 50cm (20in) long. For comparison, here it is beside a toothbrush.
Enormous parsnips from the plot
Sadly, though, we won’t be enjoying any of them. They were so long in the ground (and long in the tooth) that they were woody and fibrous, so I’ve cut them all up into beak-size morsels and filled a 5 litre tub with them.
They’re chicken food now, but impressive nonetheless.
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