Why did my carrot and parsnip seed not come up?

Beans come up in five days. Carrots and parsnips take four or five times as long, which means the seed sits in the soil for weeks with everything conspiring against it. Nothing exotic is going wrong when a row fails; it is nearly always that the seedbed dried out once, or that the soil was too cold when you sowed.

Step by step

1. Wait for the soil to warm.Sowing into cold wet spring soil is the single commonest cause of failure. Carrots germinate reliably once soil temperature is consistently around 7–10°C and above; parsnips want similar. A fortnight's patience beats a fortnight's wait for nothing.
2. Prepare a fine seedbed.Rake to a fine crumb. Big clods leave air pockets where seed dries out and never makes contact with damp soil.
3. Water the drill before sowing, not after.Draw a shallow drill, fill it with water from a can without the rose, let it soak away, then sow into the damp bottom. Watering afterwards washes fine seed about and caps the surface.
4. Sow shallow.About 1cm for carrots, 1–2cm for parsnips. Sown too deep, the seedling exhausts its reserves before it reaches the light — a very common cause of an apparently empty row.
5. Cover with dry soil.Dry soil over damp seed holds the moisture below and does not cap into a crust. It is a small technique with a large effect on these two crops.
6. Cover the row until seedlings appear.A plank laid directly on the row, or fleece or cardboard weighted down, stops the surface drying. Check every couple of days and remove the moment the first seedlings show, or they will be drawn and pale.
7. Use fresh parsnip seed every year.Parsnip seed loses viability fast — a packet a year old may be substantially dead. This is the one crop where buying new seed annually is genuinely worth it.
8. Test old carrot seed before committing a row.Ten seeds on damp kitchen paper in a warm room will tell you within a fortnight whether the packet is worth sowing.
9. Break any crust that forms after heavy rain.A baked crust physically stops seedlings emerging. Break it gently with a rake tine or a hand fork, or prevent it by keeping the row covered.
10. Sow a fast marker crop in the same drill.A pinch of radish sown along the row germinates in days, marks the line so you can weed and water accurately, and is pulled before the carrots need the space.

Tips

• Parsnips germinate better with a mid-spring sowing into warm soil than an early one into cold soil, despite the long season — the early sowings often fail outright.
• Station sowing parsnips — three seeds every 15cm, thinned to the strongest — is more economical than a continuous row given how much seed fails.
• Do not fill the row and walk away for a fortnight. These two crops need checking every couple of days until they are up.
• Sowing carrots into a container of sieved compost sidesteps the seedbed problem entirely and gives excellent germination, at the cost of yield.
• Both crops resent transplanting, so module-sowing is not a workaround — the tap root forks. Direct sowing is the only reliable route.

Common mistakes

• Giving up and re-sowing after ten days — Parsnip can take three to four weeks. Many gardeners dig over a row that was about to germinate.
• Watering the row hard from above after sowing — It washes seed out of position, packs the surface and creates the crust that blocks emergence. Water the drill before you sow instead.
• Using parsnip seed from last year — It is the shortest-lived common vegetable seed. Old packets routinely produce almost nothing.
• Sowing too thickly to compensate — It works, but thinning carrots releases the smell that draws carrot fly. Sow thinly and protect the row instead.

If it doesn't work

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