Last spring, I bought some little pots of Italian flat-leaf parsley to fill in some gaps in the bed of seed-grown parsley in the garden. But as the plants grew, the leaves seemed too big and light green to me, and they tasted funny. The seed-grown parsley started doing well, so I just sort of ignored the strange variety and focused on the good stuff.
This week, with frost approaching, I cut down all the plants and prepared to mulch all the beds with straw. But the stems of the weird parsley were very thick and crunchy and hard to cut. And then I tasted it and realized: someone had mislabeled the pots. It wasn't parsley at all. It was celery. Lost in the riot of flat-leaf parsley, it had just quietly become what it was supposed to become and I hadn't noticed.
Now, I've tried to grow celery before, and it turned out woody and slim because I didn't water it enough. This year, I missed out on a bumper crop of celery I could have enjoyed, because it was just, you know, weird parsley.
A sorry lesson in judging and dismissing out of hand because something doesn't meet our expectations. I was so wrapped up in wanting it to be parsley that I didn't appreciate what it really was. My loss.
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