Once upon a time in a land far far away, there was a woman who lived in a little white farmhouse with her four hairy dogs and her husband. She dreamed of a simpler life where she grew her own organic food in the fields where farmers had grown things for centuries gone by.

The first year that she tried, she grew vegetables with lots of sunshine and lots of rain and there were some that were too small… (there were some very tiny carrots) but there were some that grew too big… and herein lies the story of the enormous parsnip!

If you’ve read any of my previous blog posts, you’ll know that amongst other things, I’m aiming to grow most of the things for my family for Christmas dinner. This weekend saw our (quite late) first frost and so I decided that I would have a little trial run and cook a big roast on Sunday. I dug up some carrots and some potatoes and some leeks, and cut some sage to make the stuffing. But then I tried to pull up the parsnip with the largest leaves and my goodness, I’ve never seen such a creature!

Do you remember reading the Enormous Turnip at school? About a farmer and his wife who had a bad year but then they grew unfeasibly large turnip big enough to feed the whole family and their animals? And how they had to all bend down and hold onto one another’s waists to try and pull harder. Well that was us. We were in fits and yes I did fall over at one point. It took us a good fifteen minutes and we literally had to dig it out from around the sides leaving a crater the size of a small sink hole.

He measured almost a foot tall, and fed us for two meals, with leftovers! He also looks a bit like a ballroom dancer in the photo above having a jig on the worktop with his little legs and tuft of hair. And oh my goodness the flavour – literally out of this world. The taste I am sure is magnified a hundred times over when something is in your oven within twenty minutes of leaving the ground. I so love this way of living and these were just from a 50p seed packet all those months ago. Definitely one of my most successful plantings.

Between all the veg and my yorkshire pudding (necessary with every roast in this house, not just beef) made with fresh eggs from the girls next door, I’m truly not doing badly in my quest for organic freshness here. My organic free range turkey and sausagemeat for December 25th will come from the butcher at the little farmshop in the village and then I think that is pretty much me done. It does baffle me when you see photos of people going mad with two over sized trollies laden with ridiculous amounts of food wrapped in shiny paper panic buying in the supermarket – honestly – it’s not the apocolypse – it’s a big roast dinner with family where the shops just shut for 24 hours!

Roll on Christmas Day! In the meantime, it’s time to get up some decorations and I’m off on a Christmas wreath making course next week – we are surrounded by holly hedges and I thought it would be nice to make wreaths for the doors here with everything from our own land!

TTFN x