Parsnip “White Gem”
All right, all right. You can stop laughing now.
Newly washed and presented to my family for inspection, my 9-year-old’s reaction to this was, “Ooooh, Mummy, you’ve grown an Ood!”(1)
I have terrible soil for growing parsnips. Despite ladling on barrowloads of compost and well-rotted stable manure, despite lovingly constructing raised beds to create better drainage, it remains stubbornly full of stones, claggy and clayey: to grow long, straight, beautiful parsnips you need deep, sandy soil that’s light as a feather with not so much as a pea-sized pebble anywhere to be seen.
The reason I persist in producing candidates for wierdly-shaped vegetable contests is that I love the taste of home-grown parsnips. It’s one of the many veg that you never buy from the shops again once you’ve tasted your own. From the shops, they’re bland, uninteresting, rather mushy vegetables; those you grow yourself are crunchy, full of texture, and richly, even fragrantly full of flavour. In fact home-grown parsnips taste so damn… well… parsnipy that I find they sometimes need diluting: a family favourite is to mash them with carrots, or you can add them to your mashed potatoes too (plus salt, pepper and lashings of melted butter – food for the gods).
This is the crop I sowed last year (in loo roll inners for the first time which is why they’ve all developed quite well until they hit the actual soil). It’s a bit the worse for wear having spent a very harsh winter in the ground, but once peeled, perfectly fine on the plate.
The variety, though, is one I don’t think I’m going to try again: ‘White Gem’ is billed as growing in any soil (the reason I chose it), resistant to canker and fine flavoured. Well: it failed the first one, but I don’t really blame it for that as I don’t think the parsnip has been invented that could grow well in my soil. And the other two it passed with flying colours.
What they don’t mention, though, is that it has a socking great core to it which is chewy as old leather and twice as bitter: so while you think you’ve grown a huge parsnip you actually get about a quarter of that in edible parsnip flesh after you’ve cut out most of the middle of each root.
Of course I could just harvest them earlier, as woody cores develop with age: but the whole point of parsnips, to me, is that they sit there all winter waiting for you to dig them up. So while the search continues for a variety with a very small core, I’m trying ‘Countess’ this year – much praised for flavour and whiteness of flesh. I’ve just sown them, so when they come up I plan to follow the Medwyn Williams school: core out a borehole with a long pipe or crowbar, fill it with compost and topsoil, and sow (or plant) into that. Here’s to perfect parsnips, for the first time ever, this time next year.
(1): In the highly unlikely event that there are any of you out there who are not conversant with the ins and outs of the latest series of Doctor Who: there is a rather fetching picture of an Ood here. I think you’ll agree it bears more than a passing resemblance.
I do hope you get your perfect parsnips next season. This is a vegetable that’s not even part of our cuisine here, and for an exotic recipe once I searched out parsnips at the grocery store. But the recipe was Borscht, and you couldn’t taste much but beets and spice at the end of it. Now you’ve made me curious as to its actual taste. But I suspect it wouldn’t do well here, either, since we have clay and much trouble growing carrots.
Nowt wrong with being an Ood, seem to recall they turned out to be rather decent chaps once those g*ts had stopped messing with the group brain.
My parsnips look very similar to yours. I’m trying a new variety this year too, Tender and True. I’ll see how those do.
ME – that’s great, parsnips are often considered a bit of a boring vegetable here (not by me, I hasten to add) so it’s a tonic to know some people have to search them out as exotics! If you have trouble growing them in your soil, try them in pots – in fact I’m considering doing just that myself as my soil isn’t great either. All they really need is some cold weather – you don’t say where you are in the world but I’ll bet you could have a go. By the way never heard of them used in borscht but there’s a wicked recipe for parsnip and apple soup which I may just have to make and post here some time
Bilbo – you’re quite right, the Oods were on the Doctor’s side in the end. So we forgive them their bright red eyes and parsnip-like appearance.
Jo – I grew T&T the other year myself – very nice and pretty reliable as I remember it – good luck!