A Parsnip F1 Growout Update

I sowed some seeds from a mass crossing I did last autumn, selecting the Kral F1 and Halbelange F1 seed to continue my pursuit of a short fat parsnip for growing in Bendigo.
These plants are now flowering. Germination was a bit patchy, but the resulting plants are spectacular - I've measured them at over 8 feet high.

 

I've also been collecting  from a 50 plant original Kral growout. This has been progressively ripening for about the last 5 months, so I'm not sure of the quality. I've been drying it down in batches as I harvest it, and storing it in the freezer, so I will need to work up a bed to sow this soon for another autumn growout, and to assess it for quality.

The rest of the Kral F1 seed was sown about a month ago under heavy undefelt mulch at my second garden, but nothing has germinated, so it looks like it wasn't viable, or the stinking hot 43 degree days have sent it dormant.

Late pasnip flowering

My parsnip plantings were designed to

1. cross up some promising lines, and 
2. do a seed increase of Kral.

The first planting of 4 different varieties was autumn last year - about 14 months ago, with the plan to get some  autumn growth, have plants subjected to a winter regime, then get flowering in the summer. This worked, and I've got lots of potentially crossed up seed.
The second planting to increase Kral was in the early spring about 7 months ago, with the plan to grow them out over summer, over winter this winter just approaching, then collect seed next summer - but the Krals have panicked, and most of them have put up flower stems, with buds forming. Oh woe! I'm worried that winter won't be suitable for seed to mature. And I'm not going to be around for the next 3 months to check progress. Hope they last 'til August.

Parsnip progress

A while since I posted - gardening takes time.
Finally the seeds on my Short Fat Parsnip parents are ready. The Halblange and De Gurnesey have set seed synchronously, but the Kral, and the late-planted Melbourne Whiteskin have been tardy. This has implications for parsnip breeding, since the trigger for flowering is presumably day length - manipulating these varieties so that they flower together will take a bit more thought than say for corn, where you can stagger planting times. Don't think that will work for a biennial. But I think there has been sufficient overlap in flowering to allow some cross pollination.

But this difference in flowering times has further implications. Accepted advice when seed collecting is to harvest the best seed. In the case of parsnips, it looks like the first umbels have the best seed. And recall that parsnips need a big gene pool for a healthy breeding population. So in a perfect world I would collect the seed from the first umbels of all four varieties I'm growing.  But the first umbels on the early flowerers won't have crossed with the later varieties. So I've seperately bagged the seeds from what I hope are contemporaneous seed heads - the earliest from the Kral and Melbourne Whiteskin, and the second pick from HLW and DG which started flowering earlier.

On another note, the second sowing of Kral which took place in early Spring has survived the record dry, but a number of plants have started to send up flower spikes. This presents me with a dilemma - do I havest this seed (which might develop too late in the season anyway) or do I reject this seed, since it comes from individuals that are prone to annualism rather than biennialism? I don't wish to encourage genetics that allow the parsnips to bolt in one season - I might end up with a population of bolters, giving lots of early seed, but no parsnips to eat!

Below, a picture of the DG (left) and HLW (right) parsnips I pulled after harvesting the seeds.
The HLW has tubbier tubers, so closer to my desired target.

First parsnip seed

My parsips are finally seeding, the heads drying down, and yesterday I harvested the first seeds.
The 4 varieties in the first sowing haven't all flowered or seeded together, though. Halblange Weiss and de Guernsey flowering earlier than the Kral - of which I have only half a dozen plants surviving. My late sowing of Melbourne Whiteskin, which replaced a failed Kral sowing from a different seed source, is also late in setting seed.

This difference in flowering times is a bit problematic - the early seeds from the Halblange and de Guernsey will most likely have only crossed with each other, and my plan was to get a cross with the fat-rooted Kral. The seeds from the Kral are likely to have crossed with the later flowers of the other three varieties, but half a dozen plants makes for a narrow genetic base.

My plan is to harvest the late seed from the Halblange and de Guernsey, and the earliest seed from the Kral, hoping these will have crossed up, and collecting the seed from each variety separately.

It's been the driest spring/summer on record for Bendigo, and it 's been a real struggle to keep anything alive, but the breeding stock has got most of the attention, with my tomatoes now only sad dry sticks.

So just as I want some dry weather to ripen seed, it decides to rain! Gotta love nature...

A Parsnip Project Post

As I posted before, Ms Templeton is partial to a roast parsnip. But my soil is hard, and not particulalry conducive to growing long root vegetables. With carrots, I can choose a short or rounded rooted variety, but in Australia, the number of parsnip varieties generally available amount to one - 'Hollow Crown'.
A bit of a search showed up a bit more variety - Eden Seeds (and a few others) does 'Cobham', my local nursery carries Vilmorin seeds, who sell 'de Guernesey", and the big box store had a couple of different varieties - 'Yatesnip' from (surprise surprise) Yates, and 'Gladiator F1' from Fothergills.
And I recently came across 'Melbourne Whiteskin' from Southern Harvest in Hobart. But no short, fat parsnips.

Some of the North American specialty seed catalogues carry a couple of promising lines, but few export to Australia (Pastinica sativa, parsnip seed is an allowed import in Oz). 'Kral' is a short fat Russian variety, and 'Halblange Weisse' another, presumably from Germany. A friend from Homegrown Goodness was kind enough to forward some 'Kral' from Heritage Harvest Seed in Canada and, after much delay, hoop jumping and a flurry of emails, I received Kral and Halblange Weisse from Adaptive Seeds. While these are still wedge-shaped, they have most of their mass in the shoulders of the root, so seem good candidates to start a search for short fat breeding stock. Ideally, I would have liked to get hold of 'Halfback' but I can't find a source (let me know if you know where I can get some).

Another problem arose. Parsnip seed is notoriously short-lived, and germination was patchy to say the least. (Three cheers to Sarah at Adaptive, who, when I reported no-show from their Kral, instantly took it down from their website until they had done a followup germination test. That's ethics!)
Growing out parsnip seed is going to be problematic. Parsnip seems to suffer from inbreeding depression - you need to let a couple of hundred plants cross to maintain vigour. Because of the short viability, you can't grow out half the seed one year, then grow out the the other half and mix the seed lots - the older lot won't contribute much genetic material to the population since it won't be viable. Add to that the biennial nature of parsnip (it grows roots one summer, then seeds the next) and this is turning into a fairly committing enterprise - lots of selection work, lots of gardenbed space, and lots of time.
I'm hoping to do a bit of seed increase to start off, so I've sown seed late in summer, hoping for enough root development to get them through winter and develop some flower heads late next spring. With a bit of luck, I might even have enough fresh seed to share.
I'm also thinking of letting a bit of crossing happen - get a bit of fresh material into the Kral and Halblange lines, so a bit of phenotypic variety gets going, and maybe some hybrid vigour.







While you are not supposed to transplant parsnip, but sow it in situ, due to forking and distortion of the roots, since I'm looking for a seed crop rather than pretty roots, I've sown into some plug trays in my greenhouse, just to make sure I get some plants - I didn't want to risk all my hard won seed to the vagiaries of my vege plot, where a single scorcher of a day could wipe out the whole population.





With autumn coming on and the days being less intense, I chanced the rest of the seed straight into the bed. Some damp hessian cloth over the bed, and attentive watering (thanks to Ms Templeton in my absence) has resulted in lots of little parsnip seedlings on the way.

The Parsnip and Carrot Projects

Ms Templeton loves a roast parsnip. But I've never really had much luck with root vegetables in the vege garden. In part, this is because Bendigo, where I live has been in the grip of a decade-long drought, and the time for sowing carrot, parsnip and beetroot seed is spring. But this is when I've been devoting my limited water (Bendigo was under intense water restrictions, virtually banning any water use outside the house) to tomatoes and salads for summer consumption, rather than thinking about keeping root crops alive, and thriving, until late autumn.

Root crops present another couple of problems. The can be rather finnicky about germinating, and growing as seedlings in trays and transplanting them can result in misshapen and forked roots - not very attractive to Ms Templeton's delicate sensibilities. So they are best direct sown in the bed they are to grow in - the best advice is to sow them then cover the row with a wide plank, checking periodically for germination. One cunning correspondent then props up either end of the board on a brick, allowing the germinated ones to get light and grow, but also shading the row while the recalcitrant late germinaters appear. Did I mention that germination is patchy, and can extend over a few weeks?

A further complication is that checks to their growth can result in woody or intensely fibrous layers in the root. Not very toothsome on the plate.

And they like soft, yielding soil, not too heavily manured - heavy soil, or too much manure can result in forking or hairy roots. Bendigo's climate, and stony, skeletal sedimentary soils aren't therefore particularly suited to root crop horticulture.

But with a couple of La Nina years filling the tanks and lifting the water restrictions, and a newly vacant bed with lovely soil, I thought - why not have a go at breeding up some heavy soil root crops?

Short-rooted carrots are available - but only come in one colour - orange. On the few occasions I've had success with carrots, sneeking them into a corner of the seasons, I've grown 'Baby' variety. Nice, sweet carrot, but how come there aren't purple, yellow and white short rooted carrots? I already had some purple carrot seed from a few years ago, when i had some success with '3 Colours Purple', and there was a bag of home-collected seed in the door of the beer fridge. And a couple of carrots were going to seed in the asparagus patch - leftovers from a relatively unsuccessful crop a couple of years ago that had dropped some seed and few volunteers had come up, and been ignored.

And there was a grower at the local monthly farmers' market who sold purple, white and yellow long rooted carrots - I could just buy some, replant them, and grow them out for seed.

So, the plan is to sow coloured carrots, and short rooted carrots, let them cross, and then select for short rooted coloured carrots. Easy! (not).

Carrots suffer from inbreeding depression - collecting seed from just a couple of plants doesn't give sufficient genetic diversity, and after a few generations, the quality declines. So a big population of seeding plants is required. No single best plant, individual pollination here - it's mass selection time. This is going to require a bit of growing bed space.

And there is a second complication - some varieties for sale are F1 hybrids. So you ask, how does a seed company get F1 hybrids if they need lots of outcrossing between plants to maintain vigour? they can't go around individually pollinating flowers. Carrots are Umbelifereae - they have huge complex flowerheads, with tiny individual flowers - not the place for individual cross pollination, particullarly if you need to produce masses of seed for sale.

They use a genetic trait that is very useful for them, but nasty for the individual breeder - male sterility (thanks to Joseph over at Homegrown Goodness for this info). Some lines of carrots (and other commercial crops) carry a gene for male sterility - they don't producce pollen. So to get an F1 hybrid, plant lots of male sterile seed next to another variety that produces pollen, and any seed from the male sterile plants will be hybrid - it can't have pollinated itself, since it doesn't produce pollen. Why is this bad for the ameteur breeder? Because the male sterility is confered on the offspring. So unless you want a pollen sterile line, best not to incorporate these into your germplasm.

Pity I didn't realise this before I sowed seed - but not to worry, I'll just eat those ones.
So my seed sowing is
3 Colours Purple - for purple
Chantenay - for short stumpy roots
Baby  - ditto
French Round - for golf ball shape

and my mistakes -
 Harlequin F1 multicolour (which might not be male sterile)
Purple Haze F1 purple over orange centre - which i guess is male sterile.

I've also got some heritage varieties as replacement, 'Belgian White' and 'Lobbericher'- these will probably go in this weekend.

Parsnips need their own post...