==Pickling Onions== may be obtained by sowing any of the white or straw-coloured varieties that are grown for keeping, but the large sorts are quite unfit; the best are the Queen and Paris Silver-skin, as they are very white when pickled and are moderately mild in flavour.  A piece of poor dry ground should be selected and made fine on the surface.  Sow in the month of April thickly, but evenly, cover lightly, and roll or tread to give a firm seed-bed, and make a good finish.  Be careful to keep down weeds, and do not thin the crop at all.  If sown very shallow the bulbs will be round:  if sown an inch deep they will be oval or pear-shaped.

==The Potato or Underground Onion== is not much grown in this country, in consequence of occasional losses of the crop in severe winters.  In the South of England the rule as to growing it is to plant on the shortest day, and take up on the longest.  It requires a rich, deep soil, and to be planted in rows twelve inches apart, the bulbs nine inches apart in the row.  Some cultivators earth them up like Potatoes, but we prefer to let the bulbs rise into the light, even by the removal of the earth, so as to form a basin around each, taking care, of course, not to lay bare the roots in so doing.  When the planted bulbs have put forth a good head of leaves, they form clusters of bulbs around them, and the best growth is made in full daylight, the bulbs sitting on and not in the soil.

==The Onion Grub== (=Phorbia cepetorum=) is often very troublesome to the crop, especially in its early stages, and its presence may be known by the grass becoming yellow and falling on the ground.  It will then be found that the white portion, which should become the bulb, has been pierced to the centre by a fleshy, shining maggot, a quarter of an inch in length, this being the larva of an ashy-coloured, ill-looking, two-winged fly.  Where this plague has acquired such a hold as to be a serious nuisance, care should be taken to clear out all the old store of Onions instantly upon a sufficiency of young Onions becoming available in spring, and to burn them without hesitation.  If left to become garden waste in the usual way, these old Onions do much to perpetuate and augment the plague.  A regular use of lime and soot will be found an effectual preventive.  Other remedies are suggested in the article on Onion Fly, Page 420.

==Parsley==—­=see= ==herbs==, =page= 68

==Parsnip==

==Pastinaca sativa==

The Parsnip is one of the most profitable roots the earth produces.  Probably its sweet flavour imposes a limit on its usefulness, but bad cooking doubtless has much to answer for, the people in our great towns being, in too many instances, quite ignorant of the proper mode of cooking this nourishing root.  When cut in strips, slightly boiled and served up almost crisp, it is a poor article for human food; but when cooked whole in such a way as to appear on the table like a mass of marrow, it is at once a digestible dainty and a substantial food that the people might consume more largely than they do, to their advantage.