Uses for an Overgrown Parsley Plant

Butterfly Garden

• When overgrown parsley finally blooms, its bunches of tiny flowers form a kind of landing pad for small butterflies. The foliage of parsley and other plants in its family is delicious to some butterfly larvae (caterpillars), including the lovely black swallowtail butterfly.

Insectary

• Insectaries are patches of garden where plants that host beneficial insects are grown. These plants attract lacewing flies, ladybugs, parasitic wasps and other insects that devour troublesome garden pests, such as aphids, mites, caterpillars, mealybugs and scale. Parsley and members of its family are insectary plants; they are at their best when they're overgrown and even better when allowed to bloom.

Parsley Pesto

• While most kitchen enthusiasts are familiar with pesto as a basil-centric sauce, using parsley instead is an interesting alternative. Whether you use most of the parsley leaves and let the plant continue to grow so it can later bloom for other uses, or whether you take all the foliage, parsley pesto requires such a plentiful amount that you might wish it were even more overgrown. Once the leaves are pulverized with olive oil, salt, pine nuts and perhaps Parmesan cheese, the pesto can be refrigerated or frozen until use.

Considerations

• Younger parsley is preferred for culinary use, so allowing your overgrown parsley to go to seed, then planting those seeds each growing season is a good idea. Using all of these ideas, you could shear back most of the plant for pesto, allow it to go to flower so that it is a butterfly attractor and insectary plant, then gather its seeds before the plant dies for future plantings.