1 {scene: A garden in an open courtyard inside the ancient Minoan palace}
1 Ginny: Hmmm... a Minoan garden. Legend has it their king bred rectangular shaped vegetables for easy stacking and storage.
2 Erwin: Die crops are still growing! They look like parsnips!
3 Erwin: Hey, it is round, not shaped like you said.
3 Ginny: Of course.
4 Ginny: Everyone knows the square root of a Minos is imaginary.

Parsnips (Pastinaca sativa) are root vegetables similar to carrots, which they resemble except for being lighter in colour. They were widely cultivated across Europe since ancient times. They would not, however, have been likely to grow well on Santorini, as they require frosty nights to develop properly.

My original script for this strip used turnips (Brassica rapa) rather than parsnips, which have also been grown for millennia in Europe. But I got mixed up with the shapes and used a conical Lego piece rather than a spherical one which would have better represented a turnip. And I just felt too damn lazy to reshoot the photos when I was compositing them into the strip and realised my error, so I just changed the vegetable.

Oh, what's that? You didn't get the joke and came looking here for an explanation? I know that normally I do that, but this time I'm just going to provide you with the tools to research it yourself. Research is good for you!

And then you can blame Casey & Andy's Andy Weir for the pun. As much as I'd like to take credit for this one myself, he gave me the idea.

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2014-01-13 Rerun commentary: I'm not keen on parsnips. They seem to have all the bad features of carrots, without any of the good features, like at least tasting okay sometimes.

I wonder if there's such a thing as a parsnip cake?

Google says yes!