Heirloom All American Parsnip Seeds (1.5g)

The All American Parsnip variety has white flesh and is tender with mild, delicate flavor! Our seeds are 100% heirloom. 

The roots are 10 to 12 inches long with a small core and a hollow crown. All American is an excellent keeper and is frost resistant. Extra sweet when harvested in the fall!

The average time to maturity is 105 days.

Heirloom All American Parsnip Seeds Planting Instructions

Follow these detailed instructions to sow your parsnip seeds correctly for a successful harvest:

1. Sow seeds 1/2 an inch deep and 1 inch apart in early spring. Place rows 18 to 24 inches apart.
2. Seeds take 2 to 3 weeks to germinate, and even longer in cold soils. Keep the soil moist to speed up germination.
3. Sow seeds along with radishes to break soil crust and mark row.
4. Thin to 3 to 4 inches for spacing. Trim, don't pull, to avoid disturbing roots of remaining plants.
5. Mulch to suppress weeds and retain moisture.
6. Hill soil around base of plants to prevent greening of root shoulders.

Heirloom All American Parsnip Seeds Harvesting Instructions

• Best Taste – For optimal taste, harvest right before the first frost. This is when the starch-to-sugar conversion, which gives parsnips their flavor, occurs.
• Harvesting Technique - Use a fork spade to dig under and uproot with minimal damage.
• Overwintering – You can leave some parsnips in the ground over winter. Cover them with 4 to 6 inches of mulch to keep them in good condition.
• Freezing Tolerance – Parsnip roots are not damaged by soil freezing.
• Harvest Timing – Ensure you harvest before the ground gets too hard and difficult to work with, as well as before new growth emerges in early spring if you've overwintered them.
• Storage – Store parsnips in a cool place for up to 6 months, or up to 2 months in a refrigerator.

Saving Seeds

Parsnips make tall flower heads of little yellow flowers in their second year, soon followed by huge numbers of papery seeds.

Leave a good number of only the very best and biggest roots in the ground overwinter for your seed crop, otherwise you'll be keeping seed that tends to make small parsnips. Pull up any that start to flower long before the others; you don't want to develop a strain that has a tendency to bolt! You can only let 1 variety go to seed each year, as they cross easily.

Other than that, parsnip is very easy to save seed from, and you'll get much better seed than you can buy—it doesn't keep or store well at all. Radish and turnip also produce seed in their second year, so the process is similar.