Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Last week, as you may remember, in a fit of enthusiasm for the coming spring I started chitting my parsnips. Following some random instructions off the internet, I put them on damp kitchen paper and placed them somewhere warm (that was the hard part) and prepared to wait a week

A week’s perfect, I thought to myself. I’ll be going down to London in just under a week so I can deal with them then. Forgetting that, even though things do seem to happen in London twice as fast as they do everywhere else, it didn’t mean I’d be coming back shortly before I went away. So the parsnips would actually be ready for potting on when I was down in the big smoke doing battle with the tubes. Ah. Better check on them to see if any progress had been made:

So yesterday, when I should have been preparing for my trip (you know,  remembering how to elbow people out of the way, picking hayseeds from my hair, exchanging my turnips for gold coins*) I was in fact retrieving squashed loo-roll inners from the recycling box and filling them with potting compost and little chitted parsnip seeds. I’ve a feeling that I’ve left them a little late and they will fork, which means I won’t be winning any prizes at the village show – but I will have a job lot of comedy vegetables to amuse you with in autumn if they all survive.

Watch this space.

*Or, as it turns out, reading the planned engineering works email I still get from TfL every week and regard with fond nostalgia before deleting it unread. Which might have saved me a long walk in the rain…

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