Early Spring Vegetables 



PARSLEY 



So universally used for garnishing and for 

 flavoring soups and salads is of very slow germi- 

 nation and for that reason is more successfully 

 grown when started in hotbeds and transplanted 

 into the open ground in May. The ancients held 

 that parsley should never be sown as they claimed 

 that the seed had to make a journey to Hades 

 and remain six weeks; when sown in the open 

 ground it seems to bear out that theory, so slow 

 is its appearance above ground. In the hotbed 

 it requires about three weeks. England, too, has 

 its superstition of the parsley, beheving like the 

 ancients, that it should be planted, not sown, 

 that it must make the long joui'ney to the infernal 

 regions and return and that there the devil takes 

 his tithe of it, for proof of which they point to 

 the fact that a small part only of the seed comes 

 up. A better explanation would be found, I 

 think, in the quality of the seed, the home grown 

 seed coming up quite as well as other seed, the 

 boughten seed sometimes proving unsatisfactory. 



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