I don't know if planting this late will work. It might. I've grown them several ways here and the seeds sown/germinated in late spring before it got terribly hot have given the best harvest because the parsnips grow on throughout the spring, summer and fall. I've had just a little lower success rate with seeds sown at mid-summer. I just find it really hard to get them to ferminate in our hot soil and hot air temps. You cannot sow too early in spring or they are big when it gets hot and they get woody. If you sow too late in summer or fall, they don't have a chance to make good growth before it gets cold. Then, since they are biennials, as soon as it warms up in the spring (which happened in February last year), they bolt.

I have tried growing them using different planting times and find the success or lack of success relates strongly to how hot or cold it is and to whether or not I can keep the soil uniformly moist all the way down into their growing zone. To get them to grow in mid-summer, I have to either germinate them in bottomless paper cups indoors in an air conditioned room and then quickly transplant them as soon as they germinate or I pre-sprout the seeds indoors in paper towels or coffee filters inside ziplock bags. I check them every day and plant the sprouted seeds in the ground the same day they sprout. I still have to keep the ground moist and shaded with shadecloth at mid-summer to get them off to a good start.

I sort of have doubts about the viability of your seed. Parsnip is a biennial and its seed is very hard to germinate even when it is brand new and fresh. For good germination, you should use seed that is a year old or less. It can germinate in as little as a week or so (this is from my experience, I haven't looked at Tom Clothier's database to see what it says there) with fresh seed at ideal soil temps. In hotter soil or with older seed, they are very slow to germinate---it can take about a month and it is hard to keep their area moist and yet weed-free during that month.

Normally you plant parsnips at midsummer in our climate so you can harvest them in very latest autumn or in winter. They will overwinter in the ground just fine if they have reached a good size before the really cold weather hits. Cold just doesn't bother them.

Parsnips are very persnickety about germinating. They prefer cool soils (which conflicts with planting them at mid-summer) and germinate best when soil temps are between 50 and 75 degrees. Then, they take a really long time to grow--maybe 90 days or longer. I don't remember their DTMs because I haven't grown them in several years. They are cold-season crops from Europe, so cold temps do not bother them nearly as much as hot temps do, which is a plus if using them as a winter crop here.

They get really long--up to about a foot, so the soil needs to be worked really deeply and be very loose and very fluffy. I grew them here in a raised bed that sat 6" above grade level, but the bed was dug deeply--about a foot below ground--and lots of compost and peat moss was added to break up the clay. If you grow them in unimproved clay, they'll struggle and won't get nearly as large as you expect. They also are not very good at outcompeting weeds while they are small, so you have to keep them really well-weeded until they're about 6" tall.

Plant the seed the same way you would for carrots, but a bit deeper because the deeper you go, the cooler the soil stays. If I was planting them now, I'd shade the ground to keep it cooler to increase their chance of germinating. Plant them about 1/2-3/4" deep in a trench and space the seeds pretty closely because most of them won't germinate. I'd put about a seed or two per inch of row. After they germinate, wait for them to reach about 2-3" in height and then thin them to a in-row spacing of 4-6".

With parsnips, it is important that they have continually moist soil so never let them dry out. If they get too dry the roots often become pretty rough and misshapen and just don't have good flavor.

You don't have to use a floating row cover although it is a good idea to have them well mulched once they are up and growing. The mulch helps keep the soil uniformly moist. I like to put a soaker hose along the row under the mulch.

If you have voles, gophers or other ground-dwelling animals that like to eat root crops, they can be an issue with parsnips and other overwintering crops.

I love parsnips but find it difficult to grow them and salsify here. Every year it seems like it is too hot or too dry or too hot and too dry at a time they'd like for it to be cool and wet.

Dawn

Wow! I didn't know one could plant them in the summer. I plant them, here, after New Year's Day, whenever I can work the soil. They usually don't germinate until February, and they grow well until the heat sets in. I did them after frost. But I'm pretty sure they stop growing after June, due to the heat.

I have only used Cobham Improved Marrow. So I can't vouch for other varieties.

I let some go to seed, most years, and save seed. Parsnip seed is not cheap. But a half dozen plants can produce over a quart of good seed. Dawn is right about its short viability. However, if sealed in a jar and kept in the freezer it lasts for several years, at least. The best I've done, without refrigeration, is to have it germinated adequately at two years. Two years of storage is pushing it, and one should not count on it growing, at that point.

George
Tahlequah, OK

Thank you everyone for your thoughtful replies.

My plan was this, go ahead and try to locate some fresh seed. (considering what you two have told me) then make sure I use, start them indoors in the a/c in Jiffy peat pellets, then use low tunnels if the cold hits. Over winter.

I was going to do the same with carrots.

I need to stop reading Elliot Coleman, the books put ideas in my head! LOL

George, To plant them in the summer, I have to pre-soak the seeds in cold water and pre-sprout them in coffee filters and stick them in the ground as soon as they have sprouted. Otherwise, they cannot germinate in the heat. Then, I shade the ground over them until at least the end of August. Otherwise they burn up. We don't get cold here often at our end of the state until January, so they grow really well in fall. The hard part is getting them to germinate at mid-summer. I do grow them at the west end of the garden, which is shaded beginning around noon. That helps them in the summer heat. That end of the garden is the only place I have luck with plants that would rather be growing in Maine or New Jersey....like rhubarb, rutabagas, salsify and parsnips. None of them grow much in summer's heat, but if I keep them mulched and shaded and well-watered enough to keep them alive, then they make nice growth in the fall.

Ezzirah, Of course you should continue to read Eliot Coleman's books. They're the best. You just have to adapt his practices to our climate. He has nothing that resembles our summer weather, so keep that in mind when you're reading his books. However, our winter weather is nothing like his is either. When he is overwintering stuff, it often is in ground that freezes.

Dawn

I am a true Eliot Coleman fan and I love all of his books. I have bought several books recently and one of them was Coleman's 'New Organic Grower' which I had never read. I watched his entire series when he was on TV and I have two of his other books. This one is written for market growers, but has good material for every gardener. All of his books are great.

Other books I bought recently:

Seed to Seed - A good reference book but not something I will sit down and read from cover to cover.

The Vegetable Gardener's Bible - A good book but has a lot of the same information that I already had in other books.

The Resilient Gardener - I am not impressed with this book in any way. It rambles and does not hold my interest at all. Instead of being about gardening, it is about diet, weather, ducks, exercise, history, and just about anything else you can loosely connect to gardening. The gardening part of it is mostly about four crops. If you have a desire to plant four crops that will sustain life in hard times, and raise a flock of ducks, then you might find it interesting, but for me it was a waste of money.

Complete Book of Home Preserving - 400 hundred recipes for preserving the crops you grow. It looks good and I am glad I bought it.

How to Grow More Vegetables (and fruits, nuts, berries, grains, and other crops) than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine. I just started reading this last night, but I think I am going to like this one.

I like parsnips, but I'm not sure I have the patience to grow them.

Dawn - I know he uses cold frames under green houses, which would be way too much here. But I love his idea of looking at our latitude and using the season extenders. It is good to see what is possible. I can clearly see using a hoop tunnel with a frost blanket if need be and have it work. I am curious now. That always gets the Kat.

Soonergrandmom - The last book I bought was Year around vegetable gardener by Jabbour. I like the book because it takes Coleman's ideas and distills them down to practical, "here's the deal" advice.

Gardening when it counts- I bought this book, but I could not get past the writer's arrogance. The advice was good, "here's how to garden when you have nothing to work with" type advice, but geesh..he bragged a lot.

How to grow more vegetables is on the list to buy. I may just get that today, actually.

I am just too curious about the parsnips to not at least give it a go. :)

Carol,

I need to get some new gardening books to read this fall and winter. I read Eliot Coleman's 'New Organic Grower' when it first came out, which seems like it was a long time ago. I lived in the city with a mostly shady yard back then and didn't have much space to grow veggies, so I didn't get to apply much of what I had read, but I've used it since then. His wife, Barbara Damrosch, wrote one of my favorite all time gardening books 'The Garden Primer' and I believe I have both the original version and the one she updated/revised a few years ago.

I probably am going to get the new Texas edible gardening book from Texas Garden Press that replaced Dr. Sam Cotner's book. It is called "Texas Fruit and Vegetable Gardening" and is by Greg Grant, who writes for "Texas Gardener" magazine, among other things. Although it breaks my heart to think that Dr. Sam Cotner's excellent book is out of print and no longer will be available to new generations of gardeners, Greg Grant is someone whose garden knowledge and experience is superb and I have no doubt his book will be a worthy successor to Dr. Cotner's book. In fact, I read somewhere that he dedicates the book to Dr. Cotner, which I appreciate. Dr. Cotner's book was published in about 1985 and my copy is starting to fall apart, and I am looking forward to adding a new book about gardening in our region to my bookshelves. Undoubtedly, there will be new research-backed info that has been learned since Dr. Cotner's book came out almost three decades ago. Greg Grant is one of my favorite garden writers, so while I am thinking about it, I'm going to go order the book this morning. As a bonus, he is very much an heirloom plant kind of person and I expect that will be reflected in his book.

Another book from Texas that I bought and devoured this year is Dr. Bill Adams' "Texas Tomato Lovers Handbook". It is the only book about growing tomatoes that a person in this part of the country ever would need. I've read several of his previous books and they're all great. His book on the Southern Kitchen Garden is one of my favorites.

I also have a book in mind that I want to read that is about Thomas Jefferson's garden at Monticello. You simply would not believe how many of the specific varieties I grow that are on the list of what he grew at Monticello. That is sort of mind-boggling, isn't it? I love the old varieties much more than most new hybrid varieties, although with some veggies, the disease resistance bred into some of the hybrids is really wonderful too.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Texas Fruit and Vegetable Gardening