Parsnips – A crop too many?

I’m having a rethink about what I should be growing in my garden.  Sometimes I think I like the idea of a vegetable more than the reality of it.  Take parsnips for example.  I like parsnips, I enjoy them roasted, I enjoy them in soup…and that’s probably it.  They are… fine, enjoyable to eat but not something I crave and that is the essence of the problem.

Last year I grew parsnips over winter, harvested them (except one), managed to make a couple of batches of soup with them and promptly forgot all about them.  Then this year parsnips appeared in my garden, self sown from the one I forgot to harvest.  This is what they looked like in mid September:

By the time I got back from holiday in October they looked like this

So I harvested them.  I pulled one, I pulled two, soon I’d pulled the whole lot.  Some were perfect(ish if a little small), others were those weird shapes that don’t make it to the supermarket shelves.

They filled my basket.

Then they sat in that same basket for 3 days, looking at me accusingly until they started looking too wrinkly for me to bother to do anything with them.  So I composted them.

This happens to me quite a lot.  And not always with parsnips.  It’s fine when I’m growing cut and come again type crops, but when its something that needs to be dealt with then and there, and I don’t truly love it, the motivation slips and the harvest is wasted.

So with this in mind I’m going to be more selective about what I plant.  From now on I’m only going to grow things that will motivate me to cook, rather than things that require motivation to cook.  I need to finally admit to myself that my garden simply isn’t big enough to grow everything that I might like to cook.  I’m better sticking to the things I know I’ll use.  For me that’s not parsnips.  So instead I’ll just wait until the mood for soup strikes and buy them from the Farmer’s Market.  Or better yet knick them from my dad.

Sound familiar, do you grow things only for them to end up as compost?