Planting schorseneren (black salsify) seeds

Well the time has come. Time to plant some salsify. I got these seeds as a present for Dutch-Santa-Claus-Day, which is a pretty crazy holiday. Then again, Santa Claus as a fat man in a red suit living on the North Pole with a bunch of elves and flying around the world with some reindeer is pretty crazy too. Our santa claus, known as Sinterklaas, is a turkish saint, who now lives in Spain and comes to Holland every year on a boat with his black helper Pete (zwarte Piet). Kids put carrots in their shoes for his horse and get presents in return. Black Pete throws ginger cookies at people in the streets. On December 5th, everybody gives someone (chosen from a secret ballot) one gift, plus a surprise gift that you have to make yourself and a poem that makes fun of them. From the surprise and the poem you're supposed to guess who gave you the gift. My poem last year pretty much made fun of me for turning into a gardening nerd, and I got a pitchfork and lots of seeds. Good stuff.

I've never grown schorseneren before, so looking forward to seeing how it goes. Since these things get pretty long, I tried to dig down at least 2 spade-depths for the whole row. The seeds look like small woody twigs.

The trench I dug is filled with a bit of potting soil and covered with a bit of garden soil. The seeds are sown about 1 cm deep at about 10 cm apart. If necessary I'll thin the plants out later. They're quite a slow plant, so sometime in November I'll be pulling them up. Hopefully without too much forking or other mutations. 

And for some random trivia, in Holland schorseneren are also known as 'Keukenmeid verdriet,' or 'kitchen-girl's sorrow' because the skin is tough and barklike but also very sticky when peeled.