Back in December, I took the infamous Bags Of Leaves that I'd gotten from my dad and put them on top of the Parsnips and the Carrots and just left everything in the ground. Since then we've had a really intense cold weather/wind spell, and I had no idea what to expect. I took our long shovel and went to do some digging about 2 weeks ago.
It turns out there was no need to worry! The carrots pulled right out! The ground was so soft and nice. It was a bit frozen where two bags would meet, where there wasn't so much insulation, but still.
Parsnips did need digging but not because the soil was frozen. They needed digging because of the size. Last year my parsnips looked like this. This year? A couple of them were bigger. Two were at least 4 inches across the crown and 16-18 inches long. I kid you not.
Which leads me to a really great story. Matt scrubbed everything up (thank you dear!) and I bagged the larger parsnip up in a clear plastic bag, put a twist-tie on one end, and I took it to work for my coworker.
She didn't come in until around noon, so I sat the parsnip on her windowsill, pointy end up, behind the curtains where it would keep cool.
One of the federal employees came in, like he usually does at lunch, to do some research for a project he's working on. Two things you should know about him: 1) he is known nationally as Mr. Emergency Management (seriously, he is THE go-to guy for this stuff), and 2) he has a reputation for being rather, um, arrogant, but really it is just natural shyness. It's been years before we finally broke the ice.
So, he asks me if I had a nice weekend. I told him I did, I dug some carrots and parsnips. He looked at me and said, "Parsnip.....what's a parsnip?" And I said "Hold on, I have one here," and (smiling to myself devilishly) I went over to my coworkers desk, reached behind the curtain and pulled out The Monster.
He had been following me over and literally jumped back two steps when I showed it to him. His eyes went W I D E. His jaw dropped.
"HOLY MOLEY!!" He said. "Is that normal?!?! You could kill someone with that thing!!" He tentatively took it from me. He wielded it like a club.
"Does the TSA check for these at airports?!?! This is a serious weapon!"
About then my coworker came in. She sized up what was going on and said "I'm not going to ask what you two are doing."
Mr. EM went on in this vein for about 10 minutes. He was seriously impressed. He did say at one point, "Did you notice my first thought was of destruction? Yeah. It's what I do."
So, frequent fliers beware!! They're going to start carrying parsnips soon.
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2 years ago
6 comments:
Oh, for funny! I've had more than one incident when a non-gardener was all agog at what I pulled out of the earth. Do these people think food is manufactured somewhere in a factory, then sent to grocery stores in plastic wrapping? I once had a women visiting when I was in the garden cutting asparagus and she had never seen it (let alone eaten it!) before and had no idea what it was. Can you imagine? Although I will admit, your super-sized parsnip was probably pretty scary looking. Hitting somebody over the head with that could cause as much damage as a ball bat.
After a ten minute rant about a parsnip, I might have thought about actually using it as a weapon. ::lol::
Seriously? He said "Holy Moley!"?
I guy came into the shop the other day - totally ungrateful of his g/f and arrogant to boot - but I had to question how tough of a tough guy he was when he said the word "golly".
Chyeah.... ::lol::
OMG that's funny! I was eating my yogurt while reading this and I also choke on it!!! Who would have thought to use a parsnip as a weapon?
Now the authorities will enact regulations banning vegetables more than four inches long on airplanes. We can't let extremists terrorize people with parsnips, can we?
When vegetables are outlawed, only outlaws will have vegetables.
Hey Jodi, just wanted to let you know that I have just posted about my "destash" list. Please take a look see if you are interested in any of them.
YD
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