PARSLEY.
Wherever we go, the parsley plant is there to welcome us, as we sit down, hungry as a bear, to a good, square meal. The soup and the fish are seasoned with a sprinkle of minced pars ley. Its curly leaves garnish the steak or the omelette, and the salad is seasoned and adorned by the same fern-like leaves. And we do not tire of it, morning, noon, and night. It is known to everybody and it has real food value; it is not merely an accessory to the essential foods.
It is a pity that parsley is not grown in every garden for we need more green food than most of us eat, and the commonest dishes are improved by it. The reason may be that people get dis couraged waiting for the seeds to sprout, or forget where they were planted. It takes a month to six weeks for the little plants to show themselves and they are feeble until they have attained some size. If the soil is kept loose and free from weeds, a few plants will soon furnish all the parsley the cook can ask, and the bed will be a beautiful green pillow until frost comes.
The fore-handed gardener pots some little plants, and when winter comes has parsley to brighten the kitchen windows and to furnish leaves for cutting throughout the cold weather.
Sardinia is the original home of wild parsley, but to-day it grows in most European countries, run wild from gardens, and gone back to the plain leaves that mark the parent form. Selection for more ornamental leaves has developed the double curled varieties with leaves, marvellously fluted and frayed and multiplied in their subdivisions.
In sharp contrast with the wiry-rooted, bushy topped varieties, is the turnip-rooted parsley, with almost no leaves at all. The fleshy roots are cut up and used as a vegetable, or as soup flavoring. This plant is like celeriac, the flesh rooted celery, in flavor and use.