NEWS FROM MARIQUITA: A CSA Journal

Keep Rollin'
While the rest of the world savors basil and tomatoes, Andy gets pumped up to plant parsnips. It's all part of the cycle.

By Andy Griffin

Posted July 20, 2004: We are about to close another circle at Mariquita Farm. The weather here is hot now. In the still of the morning I can almost smell the basil growing. While the scent of basil might prompt some folks to a summery, Mediterranean mood flavored of pesto and warm tomatoes fresh from the garden I know it is time to begin thinking about winter roots again.

To be sure, we still have about 1000 lbs of parsnips stored in the cooler. Of course the public has lost all interest in parsnips now that there are cherries, peaches, strawberries, and raspberries in the market. Well, almost everyone. I take a few totes of parsnips to the farmers market each week for our Britannic ex-pat customers so they can savor “mashed neeps and taters”. “Mashed neeps and taters” is English for mashed parsnips and potatoes and, to hear it from them, nothing tastes as sweetly of England as a good parsnip boiled with potato and mashed with butter. But most of our remaining parsnips are now being fed to my goats who don’t read cooking magazines and aren’t conscious of “seasonality”.

It is the season to plant parsnips again if I want them on the table for the first cool days of November. Parsnip seed germinates well if it is fresh but it does take a long time. While the seed is swelling it needs to be kept consistently moist. Where we are farming this can be difficult because not only is the weather hot, it is also frequently quite windy. Watering parsnips every day until they emerge ties up sprinkler pipe we need for other plantings. Daily irrigation plus daily winds work together to create a hard shell to the soil which the tiny parsnip sprouts have a hard time cracking. Then there is bird and insect predation to worry about.

In an effort to keep pests off the parsnips we began cloaking the beds with Agrofabric, a translucent, permeable rowcover made of woven fiberglass. We discovered that all the umbellifereae we covered right at sowing time germinated beautifully. The fabric kept the wind from drying out the soil so it didn’t crust up so quickly. The mild shading effect of the row cover appeared to slightly cool the soil too and help to convince the parsnip seedlings they were sprouting under English skies. We didn’t have to water so often which helped us with labor and power costs, and we were able to better care for our summer crops.

About the time my stinky billy goat in his corral and the lavender scented English ladies in their apartments in San Francisco finish chewing the last bite of last season’s parsnips the new crop will be popping out of the ground. It is another cycle we are embarking on and I’m happy as long as we keep rolling.