Just know they’ll taste sweeter than fall-harvested parsnips, so you may want to contrast and complement that sweetness with a splash of something tangy like vinegar or lemon, or salty like tamari or miso, or spicy like mustard or hot chilies. Well, farmers are risk-takers by nature, so why not? We also grow them because they are an important part of our seasonal diets and they are so sweet and delicious, so unlike fall harvested parsnips.”Īnything you can do with regular parsnips or other root vegetables will be delicious: roasted, sautéed, steamed, mashed, stir-fried. Wait too long and the roots will start to get woody and bitter as they send all their energy to their tops to grow and eventually develop seeds.īack to Andrea: “After all the hullabaloo we go through to get overwintered parsnips, many may wonder why we do it. After overwintering, they must be harvested in the spring during a very brief window after the ground thaws but before their tops start to grow back. Quick explanation: Parsnips are biennials, meaning they create seeds their second year. So we try to get them washed and distributed within a few weeks.” We try to get them out of the ground before that happens, but they can start to sprout in storage as well if held too long. Also, overwintered parsnips are naturally at the point in their life cycle when it’s time for them to grow again, so they are quick to sprout. We use a bed-lifter to undercut the bed of parsnips and loosen the soil around them, but we still have to pick them up by hand. And of course we sometimes have wet, rainy springs or late snowfall that can impede harvest efforts. We have to wait for the ground to thaw, but then sometimes it’s too muddy to get equipment and people into the field. “Harvesting in the spring can also be a challenge. Deer really enjoy digging up sweet parsnips for a nice winter treat and can wreak havoc on a field if they discover them, which is why we do sometimes have to fence them. The chances of losing product to rot and decay are greater, and they are fair game for critters. Once we come up on the end of the season (fall), it seems pretty crazy to leave a high dollar crop in the dirt to be covered by snow and expect to go back five to six months later and expect them to be good. Once they are up, their growing season is very long, which means more time to manage fertility needs and do battle against weed pressure. They have a long germination window and you plant them fairly early in the spring when the soil is cool and weather can be unpredictable. “Parsnips, in general, are a challenging crop to grow. Richard introduced me to spring-dug parsnips almost 20 years ago when I started managing the produce department at our local food co-op.Īndrea is a trained chef turned farmer and an excellent writer, so I’m going to offer the words she gave me on the subject verbatim: My friend Andrea Yoder co-owns the farm with Richard DeWilde, who started Harmony Valley back in the 1970s and has been growing parsnips for 25 to 30 years. To learn more about the cultivation of overwintered parsnips, I went straight to one of the farms that make that extra effort: Harmony Valley Farm outside of Viroqua. Parsnips in general are a finicky and time-consuming crop to grow, and spring-dug ones take even longer, so you know if farmers are willing to put in the extra effort they really must be good. Sweet and mild, they’re a seasonal treat that makes a brief cameo at early spring farmers markets and spring CSA boxes in the shoulder time between the end-of-winter storage crops and the beginning of common spring crops. Today it’s done mostly for flavor, and once you try them you’ll know why!Īfter a long winter of eating storage root vegetables, it doesn’t seem reasonable to ask you to get excited about yet another root vegetable, but spring-dug parsnips are worth the wait. Historically, farmers would leave some of their crop in the ground after the fall harvest because they kept better there until spring than ones that were stored in root cellars. During their hibernation, freezing temperatures convert the parsnips’ starches to sugars, making them much sweeter and less bitter or earthy, as well as a bit more tender than their fall-harvested counterparts. Spring-dug (aka overwintered) parsnips are the same parsnips that usually get harvested in the fall but, instead, are intentionally left in the ground over the winter, where they get covered in snow and take a long, cold sleep.
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