I broke my own cardinal rule this spring when I planted parsley in the waterlogged back garden --- no root crops in heavy clay with high groundwater.  I don't think of parsley as a root crop, but this relative of carrots and parsnips clearly thinks of itself as a root.  Half of my plants achieved such an advanced state of root rot that the tops literally fell off.  Needless to say, we've only had just enough parsley to make a weekly batch of soup.

So, on a whim, I tossed a handful of parsley seeds on an empty bed in the loamy side of the garden near the end of August.  Unlike the rest of our fall crops, the parsley sprouted and grew so thickly that I carefully transplanted the two-leaved seedlings this week to fill up a couple of nearby beds.  Already, the leaves are almost big enough to eat --- the plants are growing about twice as fast as the spring parsley that has had all summer to get established.

The real test will be the killing frost.  Will our baby parsley be big enough to withstand the cold, or will it die back in a few weeks when temperatures drop into the twenties?  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we'll have crisp, sweet parsley through the winter just like last year.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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