Growing Parsley

A Wonderful Herb for Your Container Garden

Growing parsley in your container garden can take a little patience, but the rewards are great.

Parsley is a biennial herb which is native to Iran (Persia), which is where its English name comes from. Petroselenium Crispum and Petroselenium Filicinium are curly and flat leaf varieties, respectively.

Flat leaf or Italian parsley has a stronger flavor and is more suitable as a cooking herb. You'll find parsley, together with other herb seeds, in this great Italian Herb Seed Kit.

No matter which variety you're interested in growing, you can easily grow this versatile and under appreciated herb in a container indoors, even right in your own kitchen where it can be close at hand whenever you need it.

This herb lends itself well to many dishes, and is one of the well-known "fines herbes" used in French cooking. It can also be used to make sauces and is good in soups and can also be chopped and added to salads. It adds its fresh, pleasant taste to everything you include it in.

Parsley is easy to grow, but not necessarily from seed. The plant is notorious for being slow to germinate and needs very warm temperatures in order to do so. People used to say that parsley took so long to come up in the garden because the seed had to travel to hell and back several times before it would germinate!

Soaking parsley seeds over night can shorten the germination time, but it is far easier to buy established plants and transplant them into containers in your home than to plant them from seeds for your container garden.

You'll need a fairly large pot for growing parsley.

While the plant itself is not all that large, it has a deep taproot, so keep this in mind. The herb does best in full sun to partial shade and needs a lot of water to do its best. You can begin clipping off leaves for use once the plant grows to a height of about six inches.

Remember not to take more than a third of the leaves at any one time, in order to allow your parsley to continue healthy growth. If you want to stimulate more growth, clip off entire stems rather than just leaves.

Parsley is a wonderful, versatile herb which has a hundred different uses in the kitchen. It is also an attractive plant that, if properly cared for, will last for two years and make a great addition to any indoor container garden.

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