Medwyn Williams has been growing different parsnips
But why are those in a steel cylinder growing stronger than the others?
Inormally grow one variety of parsnips in drums inside my glasshouse, but this year I’m growing three different ones.
I’ve four barrels of ‘Victor’, a new variety I introduced two years ago that has won at the highest level. The next four are ‘Panorama’, a really long, smooth variety that has done very well for Marcus Powell in his collections over the past few years. The third is a new variety by Tozer Seeds, which is as yet unnamed and allegedly one of the whitest parsnips you can stage. Jim Thompson staged them at the Southern Branch Championships last year and the set stayed white throughout the competition.
The best of these parsnips will be displayed on my stand at the Malvern Autumn Show later this month and they’re all growing really well.
There’s one strange thing happening though. All my barrels are old, 45 gallon oil drums with the exception of one, which is a straight-sided steel cylinder with the same internal bore as the oil drums. The new Tozer parsnip is growing in this one, as well as in the other three drums next to it, but the parsnips in this straight-sided cylinder are by far the most powerful. Just by looking at the size of the stalks alone you’d think they’d been sown at least a month earlier. I’ve no idea why this might be. My main concern now is whether they’ll be too big, which can cause problems when pulling them at the end of September.
My stump carrots are doing well in the carrot bed covered with Enviromesh and there was no sign of the dreaded carrot fly when I checked at the end of July.
Although it hadn’t developed a stump end at that time, everything looks very promising for the end of the month. I give all the carrots a foliar spray at that time with Peters Professional high potash 9-9-36 to see if the colour can be improved further.