Kitchen Garden Forum

Having today dug up a number of parsnips (variety 'Countess'), I found all of them forked, some quite contorted. They'll be fine for eating because above the multi-tail is a perfectly solid, large body of parsnip, but I am wondering why have they forked? The soil is very friable on that spot on our allotment, does not contain any stones as far as I know and was last manured two seasons ago.

I grew them the "Johnboy-way" by pre-germinating them on kitchen towel, planting them in roottrainers and then transplanting them into the bed, a method I have used three or four years now and always works but the forking has certainly never been as bad.

Evening Monika, i have few that have done this too, i'm sure mine was down to the soil becoming very dry, as the root was trying to grow to full depth.

Hi Monika, I know you are a seasoned gardener so you will probably already know this, you say no stones so the only other causes I know are being too dry while roots are forming and fresh manure can cause rhem to split, there may be other reasons but those are the only other two I can think of.
and you probably thought of that too .My guess is you probably watered well but in that drought everything did really dry out very quickly indeed by evaporation and that may be why.
Ooops looks like OH and I posted at the same time.

The only other reason I can thin of is root damage when transplanting but I'm sure you would have been too careful

My parsnips are forked as well, although they are very tasty. I think that you may well be right about the dry weather causing this since they have never forked before in this plot.

Barney

I have grown Palace variety again this year, and they are nice and straight. Not much extra watering, as I prefer them to go down in search for moisture.
The only problem I have is most of them so far have some canker around the top couple of inches. Once that is cut off though the rest is lovely

Many thanks for all the replies. Yes, it was probably the dry wether we had in early summer - I never thought of that. And I did not water them at all, hoping that their roots would make their way down to the damper soil below. Another lesson learnt!

I've done an experiment this year and planted two rows by the method recommended by people growing them for show, ie by making deep holes with an iron bar and filling them with fine compost and sowing three seeds in the top and thinning them down to one. They are adjacent to two rows of seeds planted at the same spacing, but directly into the seed bed with no hole drilled.

I dug up one from each row and the one given special treatment was smooth and perfectly formed and the one just planted in the seed bed was a twisted mass of roots. I'll try and put a photo on.

Hopefully, a picture: So they seem to need a bed of deep very fine soil. The bed they are in has been dug and fed and is a medium clay loam and doesn't seem to have any stones in it, but the difference is startling.

Amazing result Plumpudding,what a contrast,thats one for my tips note pad for next season

A tip worth copying Plumpudding, thankyou for sharing it, wow - what a difference !

Plum Pudding. Thanks for the photos. - that's an amazing difference and illustrates what a difference a little time and trouble can make to the end result, for your vegetables.
I've only dug up a hanful of parnsnips so far this year, and only one of them has not been forked. I suspect in my case it was a combination of earlier digging not being done deeply enough to break up earlier compacted soil which was trampled on during the winter, and the dry period. Although I did water, our soil is quite light and dries out quickly so although the surface looked moist, sufficient water may not have penetrated further down. I agree that forked parsnips shouldn't be wasted - I often use the "rats tails" bits in caseroles or mixed roasted winter vegetables, but it does make preparation of them more fiddly.

Are some varieties more prone to forking I wonder?

GL, I think it's the growing conditions rather than the variety. I have grown a lot of different varieties over the years (though mainly Countess and Student more recently) and have always had some forkers, but never as bad as this year!

Plumpudding's brilliant photos remind me, though, of once looking at an allotment site in a nearby town and one allotment looked like an oil refinery, all upright large pipes, about four feet high. On getting closer, we realised that the chap was growing his parsnips in those! I do hope he was successful on the show bench because it looked like an awful lot of effort (and cost) to me to fill all those pipes with suitably soft soil!

Sorry to put a dampener on this, but I don't see the point of growing parsnips for showing if this means growing the thing with an enormously long tapering tail. The tail is so thin that you are going to a great deal of trouble to grow something of little or no consumable bulk. I don't see the point of growing food just to look at!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/41486084@N04/5146586427/#/

I hope the above line will get you to a picture of 2 parsnips [Turga] which I grew in 2008. I had put a lot of leafmould in the previous winter after digging. You'll see the tail is bulky enough to provide a good mouthful. Not all the produce was like these, but they all tasted good!