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Parsnips
Roy98
Posts: 4
Can anyone help - my parsnips produce enormous leaves and stalks about 18 inches high but are themselves very small and thin in body.
Thoughts anyone?
Regards, Roy
0
Posts
Dear Scroggin
thank you for your excellent advice and diagnosis. You are spot on.
My senior horticultural advisor told me: " Nettle tea to provide the leaf crops with nitrogen, comfrey tea to provide potassium for flowers and fruit.". "What about the roots?" I asked him, and he didn't know. Now you've given me half the answer - phosphorus. But is there a cheap as chips plant which is naturally rich in phosphorus, from which I can brew a foul-smelling liquid feed?
Bonemeal or fish, blood and bone added to the soil before sowing is the easiest way of providing root crops like parsnips with enough phosphorous. As far as supplemental liquid feeds go, comfrey 'tea' has as much as anything else and is good for just about anything. It also has a significant amount of trace nutrients which the comfrey is able to pull from the subsoil due to its deep roots.
Thanks for this, Bob. As a vegetarian, I prefer not to buy slaughterhouse by-products, so l'll make do with the comfrey. Next time 'im indoors cuts himself shaving, I'll hustle him out to the beetroot bed so he can bleed into it.
It's the bonemeal not the blood (which mainly supplies nitrogen) which has the phosphorous. Many vegetarians have no issue with consuming fish based products so if you fall into that category you could look for fish-bone meal which is available.
Last edited: 30 September 2017 21:21:11
Definitely over nitrogen or manure use, I'm an advisor to farm parsnip crops, wont be too high population as they would produce short stalks and leaves.
Peter