Elevate your home-cooked meals with a sprinkle of fresh parsley. The best part is you can easily grow this popular herb in your garden or just by your kitchen window!
The Growers Exchange offers the best deals for healthy, vibrant parsley plants delivered to your doorstep. Browse our parsley plants for sale and check out the perfect one for your home garden today.
What Are the Benefits of Growing Parsley at Home?
A popular herb used for cooking, parsley elevates almost every type of cuisine or dish. Some of the benefits of having your parsley plant include:
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Improved Taste: When you grow parsley at home, you can guarantee that the herbs you harvest will be of excellent quality and offer superior taste to store-bought varieties. Freshly picked parsley simply tastes better!
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Nutrition Boost: Parsley is more than just garnish – it’s a superfood rich in nutrients! It’s an excellent source of vitamins A, C, and K and other nutrients such as antioxidants, iron, and other minerals. Fresh parsley has more nutrients than store-bought pieces that have lost some freshness and nutrients.
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Pest Control: While growing in your garden, parsley can be a natural and organic pest repellant. Its strong scent deters harmful insects, such as aphids, while attracting beneficial insects like ladybugs.
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Eco-Friendly: Choosing parsley plants means choosing sustainable cooking options. Growing parsley means reducing your carbon footprint through less plastic packaging, fewer food miles, and a significant reduction in food waste.
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Garden Aesthetics: Parsley plants add an attractive and vibrant green touch to your garden or home, serving as both an ornamental and edible addition to your space.
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Cost-Effective: In the long run, investing in a parsley plant is more cost-effective than regularly purchasing store-bought herbs. With proper care, a single parsley plant can provide plentiful herbs all season.
What Are the Differences Between Curly, Flat, and Italian Parsley?
Curly parsley is characterized by bright green, ruffled leaves and is the most common variety. This is often the type of parsley you would find in grocery stores. With its mild, slightly bitter taste, curly parsley is predominantly used as a garnish but can also add flavor to soups, stews, and salads.
Flat-leaf parsley has broad, flat leaves that make it easier to clean and chop. With its bright, peppery flavor, flat-leaf parsley is favored by many chefs and used in various culinary applications, from pasta dishes to chimichurri sauce.
Italian parsley is a flat-leaf variant, but its popularity in Italian and Mediterranean cuisine puts this variant in a league of its own. Known for its dark green leaves and robust flavor, it is a key ingredient in various herb blends, such as Italian seasoning and bouquet garni.
Flat-leaf parsley is more potent than curly parsley, making it ideal for cooking and seasoning. While each variety has distinct characteristics, their care requirements remain relatively similar.
How To Take Care of Your Parsley Plant
Our parsley plants leave our greenhouses in good health. With proper transplanting and good care, you can keep your parsley plant thriving. These are some of the steps to consider before and after you receive your parsley plant.
Check Your Hardiness Zone: All parsley plants are biennial and grow best in zones 5-9. Use our zone finder to determine if your address falls under these zones and when our shipping schedule for your area begins. If you live outside these zone ranges, your plant may not thrive as well as it can. Feel free to contact us for more information!
Transplanting: Flat-leaf parsley reacts better to transplanting than curly-leaf parsley. We provide instructions on how to handle your plant once it arrives. Parsley plants are best kept in a garden or a sunny window. They can grow indoors, but they will require a lot of sunlight and will eventually need to be placed by a window or outdoors when they grow.
Light: Parsley plants thrive with at least 6 hours of sunlight daily. An outdoor location with full sun to partial shade is ideal. Provide bright, indirect light for indoor plants or supplement with a grow light if natural light is insufficient.
Water: Parsley plants require consistently moist (but not soggy) soil. Make sure to water your parsley thoroughly, allowing the water to reach the plant's deep roots. For indoor plants, water when the top inch of the soil feels dry to the touch. Outdoor plants may require daily watering, particularly during hot and dry weather.
Soil: For optimal growth, parsley requires well-draining, fertile soil with a pH between 6 and 7. Amend your soil with organic matter, such as compost, before planting. For container-grown plants, use a high-quality potting mix and consider adding perlite or vermiculite for improved drainage.
Fertilizer: Feed outdoor parsley plants with an organic granular fertilizer or a balanced, all-purpose liquid fertilizer every 4 to 6 weeks during the growing season. Use a liquid houseplant fertilizer diluted to half strength for indoor plants every 4 to 6 weeks.
How To Harvest Your Parsley
Harvest parsley leaves as needed from the outer stems, allowing the central stalk to continue growing and producing new leaves. To capture the best flavor of your parsley, harvest the leaves in the morning.
Find More Culinary Herbs at The Growers Exchange
Add more than just parsley to your herb collection. Find healthy, organically-raised herb plants at The Growers Exchange today!
