Carrot and parsnip

Carrots and parsnips remain firm favourites in the garden and on the dinner table. TINO CARNEVALE shares his tips for growing success

Some plants are just fun – from the sowing to the growing, the harvesting and beyond. Carrots and parsnips are like old friends. As I travel around Australia, I’m always happy to see them being grown in so many gardens, in a range of climates, by gardeners from diverse backgrounds.

Although carrots are excellent in cooked dishes, both sweet and savoury, they are one of my favourite vegetables to eat raw. You can also eat parsnips raw (although they don’t taste that great uncooked), but a roast parsnip is truly a thing of beauty. Both are favourite crops of mine to harvest. Pulling up a well-developed Topweight carrot or Guernsey parsnip can feel like drawing Excalibur from the stone!

getting started

As with most vegies, carrots and parsnips like plenty of sun, but they can still do well with as few as 3–4 hours of direct sunlight a day. Much of their growing success is about the dirt. Provide them with a deep, light soil and you’ll be rewarded with perfectly formed specimens that are straight and true. Taproot vegetables are prone to forking when the soil is heavy or has a hardpan or clay layer. When the tip of the root meets with too much resistance, it divides or twists. (It’s still good to eat, just a bit harder to deal with.) Light, sandy soils can be a real advantage with these root crops. To prepare a heavy soil, I dig it deeply and break up the clods with a hoe, then fork through some fine compost. There’s no need to add fertiliser, as these vegies prefer things on the leaner side.

Buying punnets of carrot and parsnip seedlings is not a great option because they hate root disturbance. Better to go with seed. You’ll get a few years out of a packet of carrot seed, but parsnip seed is best purchased fresh each year, as its viability decreases rapidly with age. Parsnip seeds are slow to germinate, often taking up to three weeks, so soak them in warm water overnight before planting, to speed things up. The many times I’ve re-sown parsnips, thinking the original sowing wasn’t working, only to have them poke their heads up a few days later, is something I probably shouldn’t admit.

Gardeners have developed lots of ways to sow carrots, from planting individual, evenly spaced seeds in straight lines, to roughly broadcasting seeds and covering them with sieved compost (as I do when gardening with my kids… because having straight rows of anything is a challenge!). Some people use seed tape with the seeds pre-spaced, which is a handy option.

Years ago, my grandfather and I saw Peter Cundall on Gardening Australia mix carrot seed with sand to achieve even distribution. We thought it was genius. Simply get a jar and punch a hole in the lid with a nail. Fill the jar with dry sand and some carrot seed, then hold your thumb over the hole and give it a shake. Make a drill 1cm deep in the soil, then pour the mix, through the hole in the lid, steadily along it.

My grandfather also liked to cover the planted row with a plank of wood after watering in the seed, to trap in the moisture. Carrot seed needs to be kept constantly moist to germinate.

growing tips

When seedlings appear, start thinning them – not too heavily, but just enough to allow individual plants to have space to develop without the roots touching as they swell. If you do this gradually and continuously, you get a nice harvest of mini carrots or parsnips along the way. Weed your crops regularly, too, to reduce competition.

The plants are easy to care for once established. They can cope with occasional dryness, but they like a bit of water to stay juicy, otherwise the roots may become woody and split. Sow a row of these vegies once a month through your zone’s optimal sowing period, and you could be swimming in taproots for most of the year.