We made the obligatory trip to the allotment to harvest some vegetables to have with our Christmas dinner.
We usually go to the plot in the afternoon but, as rain was forecast, we went in the morning.
It was very gloomy and soggy underfoot. The ground has metamorphosed from too hard and dry, through too soggy and muddy, too hard and frozen and back to too soggy and muddy.
Just as we were completing our harvesting, it started to rain so the decision to set out in the morning was the right one.
The sprout plants didn’t enjoy the drought conditions despite us trying to keep up with the watering. We didn’t expect to find that any sprouts had developed but a couple of plants had formed some baby sprouts.
We lifted the first of our parsnips. Due to sporadic germination followed by inhospitable growing conditions, we were not expecting much. We managed to dig some usable roots from the end of the bed where germination had been the best but the parsnips at the other end of the bed were tiny and not worth bringing home. Our best root was somewhat of a surprise. When thinning out the seedlings I had missed one station and two rather large plantlets were growing side by side. I decided to flout the growing ‘rules’ that tell us that parsnips can’t be transplanted and carefully replanted the extra root. Incredibly this transplant produced our best parsnip. Sometimes it pays to tear up the rule book! We filmed a video of our morning harvesting and it is posted here
A couple of non-Christmassy meals that we had this week that used our homegrown vegetables were firstly a vegetable curry. Into this went some of our squash, onion, frozen green beans and frozen red peppers. It was served with brown rice and Martyn’s homemade naans.
Later in the week, I made a turkey hotpot that used our potatoes. frozen sweetcorn and frozen peas. I also added some mushrooms,
That’s all for this week, until next time I hope that you have a happy and peaceful Christmas. As always stay well, stay safe and keep warm.
Those are wonderful looking parsnips and some tasty meals as always. I hope you had a good Christmas. All the verybest to you both for 2023.xxx
We probably had a much quieter Christmas than you, Dina but that was how we like it.
Glad to read that you were able to harvest some vegetables to have with your festive meal Sue. I hope that you had a lovely day yesterday and have enjoyed today too xxx
Thank you Anna – I hope that you did too
Merry Christmas to you, Martyn and Ruby. Enjoy your homegrown dinner!
Thanks Deb
A lovely harvest indeed! I have transplanted parsnip seedlings before but they didn’t grow very big, you have done well. Merry Christmas xx
I’m guessing that this was because it was bigger than just a seedling AH It probably wouldn’t work again.
I think parsnips may be in short supply this year as we went to three different supermarkets before we found any, perhaps that’s down to the weather we had this summer. Wishing you both a very merry Christmas xx
We do our supermarket shop online, Jo and I looked up parsnips on the two sites that we use and they both had parsnips. Morrisons were short of tomatoes though and they were all out of stock this week too. Fortunately Ocado had plenty.