Some roots, some shoots, some bags and some netting

In a few months this should be abuzz with garden friends

Everything is aching today, fingers, thumbs, the palms of my hands. Wrists, arms and shoulders, not forgetting my back, legs and even the soles of my feet (although they may be due to my worn out boots)! Nevertheless, when I say everything, I mean everything.

Advertisement

Parsnip, Gladiator (direct sown)

This is a record of how long this particular set of seeds took to germinate and how they looked at various stages from first appearance to the development of the first set of true leaves and beyond. I hope this will prove useful.

Variety: Gladiator
Direct Sown: 12th April 2013
First Seedling: 18th May 2013 (approximation)
Germination: 37 days (approximately)

This first series of pictures shows newly emerged parsnips from just a day or so old to a few days old. I find parsnip seedlings extremely difficult to identify when they are newly through because they look a lot ike the seedlings I get all over the garden from a neighbours tree! It is only when the first leaf starts to form, that I realise what they are. You can just see the first true leaf starting to grow in the middle picture and it is much more obvious in the third photo.

 

   

Time for a bit of gardening

Vegetable garden at the start of the afternoon

I awoke at 4.30 this morning to the sound of significant rainfall and the realisation that, actually, we haven’t had much in the way of rain for the last few weeks, not even in the form of snow. Then I closed my eyes and went back to sleep. A couple of hours later and although the heavy rain had ceased, we were still experiencing showers and I realised that if, as forecast, the rain stopped late morning, then the soil in the beds would be ideal for planting by mid afternoon and I gleefully pulled out my carrot, parsnip and beetroot seed packets in anticipation of a couple of hours hard graft in the vegetable patch.

Parsnip roots and snow

We have snow!  Like me you could be forgiven for thinking that, based on my post ‘No snow for Mud‘, the arrival of snow would be cause for celebration for Mud but no, this is the wrong sort of snow, it wont last and, as it is now the middle of the working week, he wont have an opportunity to go play even if his prediction is wrong and it lasts and gets deeper overnight.

To be fair, he is probably right and I can understand his frustration in respect of the timing of this snowfall but, hey, the girls are happy and the garden always looks so pretty, especially when there are no footprints to mar the crisp whiteness. Mind you, having thought about it and despite Muds’ mutterings to the contrary, it is probably a good thing that it has fallen today because I can just imagine how much more frustrated and despondent Mud would be, had he been in a position to go play because the current level simply isn’t deep enough.

Mother Nature, Parsnips and Christmas

“I will have parsnips with Christmas dinner”, is  a phrase that will probably stay with me until the very end, along with the corresponding image of Mud attacking my parsnip bed with a wood axe, last Christmas, in an attempt to free the last of the parsnips. from the frozen ground He’d already managed to hack a few leeks out but Christmas dinner without honeyed parsnips was not an option.

On Muds’ express wish I had grown loads of leeks last year. The parsnip numbers, however, for some reason were a little low and those that had grown weren’t exactly over-sized (unlike 2009 where one root alone was the girth of a milk bottle and weighed in at 1lb 8 oz) but they were respectable and Mud was determined to ‘harvest’ some.