How to Grow Basil so You Have it Forever

Foreign basil plant could give you a lifetime supply, but how do you care for it so it lasts forever? So basil is in the mint plant family or the lamiaceae plant family. You would also know mint, obviously, rosemary, thyme, sage, oregano. Basil is like that one cousin in the family that's a little different because all those other plants, they're perennials, meaning they will stay in the garden year after year after year. So even though basil's in the same family as all those perennials, it's the weird cousin that's an annual. It actually only stays in the garden for one year. It will not grow back from its roots in the following spring. However, because you're watching this video, you're going to know how to make your basil plants last forever. Basil is not frost tolerant, so it can only grow after frost. And before your first frost. Any kind of frost is going to kill basil in the garden. So you want to start basil either by a plant or by seed after your last frost has passed. I generally like to start my basil by plants so that I get basil sooner in the season and get to enjoy it for a longer part of the year. Outdoors, basil can be started by seed under lights, indoors for about 30 days before you move it out to the garden. Or you can find a nice starting plant at a local nursery. Be sure you're buying a natural and organic variety. And those $4 you spend on that basil plant, you're going to get well over $40 worth of harvest if you harvest the way I'm about to teach you. So the way you cut your basil is literally what determines how long you'll get to keep your basil. The mistake that almost everyone makes when it comes to pruning their basil or harvesting it is they just pinch off leaves one at a time. So from random spots in the plant. This is something you should never do. Instead, you want to take pruners and you want to cut an entire tip of the stem at the point of the leaf node. Each of these leaves is growing in bunches along a main stem. And instead of taking one leaf at a time, you actually want to take pruners and cut right above a leaf node. So let's take this stem as an example. The place to cut this stem would be right here or right here, or even down lower on the plant, right about here. And you can see how each of these spots, we've got two leaves here, and right at this leaf node, we're getting two new sets of leaves that are growing. So when you harvest right there at the top of the leaf node, you're literally creating two new stems that are going to shoot and give you more leaves instead of just one long one. You can see here on this stem how I did just that. So I cut right above the leaf node. And now instead of just having one long stem, I'm going to have these two branching stems that are going to give me twice as many leaves as I would have gotten from just that one long one. So on this stem, I'm going to cut right here above the leaf node. That's going to give me double the leaves on that one plant. And now, with just this one cutting, I've got so many things I can do to get a lifetime supply of basil. So first off, I'll use these lower leaves in the kitchen. These will take care of the caprese, the pesto, whatever it is that I'm doing with my basil. And then with this tip, what I'm going to do is actually pinch off the top tip like this. I'll use that in the kitchen as well. And then I'm going to take this stem, and I'm going to cut it at an angle about the height of my jar. So my jar is like this. It's filled with water, and I'm going to give it a cut right above this node at an angle. So I'm going to cut here, right at a diagonal, and then I'm going to take this stem and put it in this water. I'll put this in a low light area in my kitchen, and I'm going to get roots to form on the base of this stem. Now, I can either replant this in the garden when there's no chance of frost outside, or I can replant this cutting indoors and grow basil indoors in the off season when it's too cold outside. So when you switch your harvesting method from one leaf at a time to an entire stem, you get all the basil you need right now. Plus you get promise of many plants to come. Now, when you harvest it this way, you're going to find that you've got way more basil than you know what to do with. So let's talk about what to do with all this basil. First off, of course, you can use it right away fresh. You can make caprese literally every day of the summer. I use this as a salad green. So I mix this in with maybe an otherwise grocery store salad in the middle of the summer. Shh. Don't tell anybody, but just adding some fresh homegrown basil on Top of otherwise boring lettuce from the grocery makes it taste homegrown, the whole thing, and much more delicious and flavorful. You can also start to store your basil for later use. So I made a whole video on how to store basil leaves in oil so that you can use them in the middle of winter when there's no basil outdoors. You can also take basil cuttings like this, tie them up with twine, and hang them to dry in a cool, dark place. You'll want to let these leaves get completely brittle, completely dried out, and then you can crumple them up and store them in a jar. I like to use an amber jar for storage so they don't lose their flavor. And this is a great topping for homemade pizzas, for homemade spaghetti pasta dishes, lasagnas. You can use this all winter long in a dried format and. And you'll get to make sure you use all the basil that you've grown. Now, as your basil grows in the garden and it gets hot or dry or just toward the end of its life, it's going to start to want to produce seed. This is the way it guarantees that it comes back next year. You can slow this down by harvesting more often. So as soon as you start to see that seed forming, you want to come on that main stem and prune it in just the way we do all the other stems. The flavor is going to start to get more licoricey, more anise y. At this point, it's going to go a little bit more bitter, but you can still enjoy a lot of basil before those seeds start to form. Now, when you get closer to your first frost of the year, maybe 30 days or so out, maybe even 15 days, you can start to let these seed pods stay on the plant and fully form. They're going to flower first. As these flowers dry, they will turn into seed. Don't pull out the plant. Let the plant go fully to seed, because this is going to give you literally hundreds of basil seeds for all the coming years. For yourself, for your friends, for your friends friends. You're going to have basil for the whole neighborhood. So inside each of these little florets will be two or three basil seeds each. They're tiny little black seeds, and they're so valuable, so don't toss them in the compost pile. You can let these seeds dry out over the winter, and then they'll be ready to plant as soon as frost has passed the next year. It's literally basil for the rest of your life. Because next season you'll Plant new plants with these seeds, let them grow up, go to seed again at the end of the year, and boom, you get more seeds once again for the next season. When it comes to pests and disease, basil is a low maintenance plant. But you may see signs of issues, especially the longer the plants stay in the garden and the less you harvest from them. Case in point, I don't think I've harvested from this basil plant once during this entire season. I've just got so many basil plants, but you can see that this one is starting to be attacked by caterpillars. We're starting to see little holes in the leaves, signs that there might be spider mites, there might be aphids, and there might be caterpillars. The way to deal with pests on basil is really simple. The first is to harvest more. You want to be harvesting from these plants so that you're getting constant new growth and the plant is getting a chance to reinvigorate itself with newer leaves. Of course, if you see pests on the leaves themselves, things like caterpillars, remove those from the leaves and remove any affected leaves. So when I see a leaf with a hole in it like this, I'm going to remove it from the plant as soon as possible. And then I'm going to be sure that there's no debris around the base of the plant because caterpillars, slugs, all those crawling insects, they get onto the plant from the soil level. And you want to be sure there's no debris that's giving those insects a bridge onto the plant. So I'm going to clear the space underneath the plant. I'm going to add a little bit of organic mushroom compost around the base, giving the plant a little vitamin to protect itself. And then I'm going to be sure that anything that's affected, anything that's looking less than healthy, I'll cut it off of the plant. Never remove more than a third of the plant at a time. If the entire plant is infected or more than a third, then what I'll do is take some cuttings so that I can root them and get some new fresh plants off of this one. And then I'll just cut this plant from the base and start over. When you do the math, it makes sense for every single one of us to be growing our own basil. Just one ounce of grocery store basil is going to cost you like 3, 3 to $5 and taste like cardboard. Whereas $4 to buy one basil plant is going to give you 10, 15 ounces of basil throughout the season, plus seeds for next year, plus plants that you can bring indoors and over winter. This is a no brainer plant and now you know how to make it happen. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. 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