Any tips on growing parsley?

[Guest]

[Roz]

Right, here I am armed with approximately 1000 parsley seeds!

Does anyone here have any experience of growing good parsley and any tips?

I want to keep it 100% GM free where possible So any suggestions of mutating it will garlic and cattle to make the perfect garlic bread butter will be ignored!

 

[Roz]

"In England there is a saying that parsley seed goes seven times to the Devil and back before it germinates, and claim that only witches can grow it. As well, it is traditionally a curative, a property captured by Beatrix Potter in The Tale of Peter Rabbit. She says about that naughty rabbit, "First he ate some lettuce and some broad beans, then some radishes, and then, feeling rather sick, he went to look for some parsley.""


Oooh - only witches can grow it! We'll soon find out if I was destined for Hogwarts!

[ferdinand_the_yak]

So any suggestions of mutating it will garlic and cattle to make the perfect garlic bread butter will be ignored!

Well, if you are going to be picky.... then no.

 

Good luck with it! Any particular reason why parsley?

[Roz]

Well the odd thing is I don't actually like parsley myself!

But Mark's a mad fan of parsley sauce on salmon, especially if you add prawns and make it "prawn and parsley sauce"

So 3 or 4 years ago when I was on a day trip to the Isle of wight I bought a souvenir for him, a tiny pot, seeds etc to grow parsley... Mark forgot all about it (ungrateful wretch) and only found it a few months ago, but the seeds were too old and didn't germinate  

At the weekend whilst I was home I ventured into a garden centre... I hotfooted it out of there once I saw the hugest hornet ever in there (but I did manage to get a pack of 1000 parsley seeds before I left!

(I am making myself out to be mortally frightened of insects here, but I remember a friend once getting stung by a hornet, she did recover quite quickly but she said it ws like being kicked in the back by an Elephant...

I presume she has experience of that

[MakTheYak]

Hornets are nasty buggers. Really nasty. I've only seen one in the flesh once and that was when it was just perched on the wall by the bottom of the stairs of the house I grew up in. It must have been as long as the first two joints in my index finger! Yikes! Keep it away!

[ferdinand_the_yak]

Are hornets similar to European wasps? We have those here (introduced from erm... Europe, I believe ) and they are horrible things. Huge and very painful sting is what I have been told, I have never been stung myself by that or anything else thank goodness!

[Roz]

Yes, it's almost identical to a normal wasp/bee thing but seemed to me to be about 8 times the size... sometimes the sting can kill I believe... and they seem to hang around horsey areas... not sure why!

[ferdinand_the_yak]

 

Yeah, that sounds like the wasp I am talking about, it can kill as well. I am not sure whether its sting is poisonous or whether some people develop severe allergic reactions to it.

I don't wonder that there is a saying about troublemakers that goes 'like stirring a hornet's nest'!

[Roz]

Ahh yes, lots of people are allergic to normal bees/wasp stings.... I'd have lived in constant fear this summer if so, we had a mild winter, and it naturally follows that we will have many wasps the following summer.

So fingers crossed for super snow all winter!

Apparently high wasp summers come in 5 year cycles but this goes beyond the usual high