Parsnips

I inspected the parsnip seeds when I got home last night and there were quite a lot that have germinated. 

The trick I've found in the past is not to let them get too big before trying to move them. Last year I moved them straight into their final locations at the plot with very poor results due to a very dry spring. This year I decided to go the slightly longer route, but a more reliable one for getting a good crop.

Using an old jam funnel I filled the toilet roll tubes to about an inch from the top with multi-purpose compost 

and firmed it down

Carefully handling the seeds only by the seed case placed them onto the firmed down compost. This is now where I could (probably) bore you by explaining about tropisms, types of germination and root hairs. 

Normal advice is not to handle the seeds when they are in this state as the developing shoot is very fragile. However I have had good success from this before and handling the seed only by the seed case eliminates most cases of damage occuring.

Some of the seeds havent yet germinated and may not (I will leave these a few more days to see if any more do then repeat the process above). This is the whole reason that I have come to use this method of sowing parsnips. They have a ridiculously poor germination percentage under good circumstances and in the past I've had 3 rows of parsnips where there have been 5 seeds all develop at one end and nothing else in the whole row. Doing this means that they will get planted out as plants, at the correct final spacing, and there wont be any need for thinning out, or empty rows with sporadic crops.

 Finally watered gently and now in the (unheated) greenhouse to grow on for a while.