How to easily, quickly and reliably grow basil
All you need is a pot of it from the supermarket
This essay is part of the You Can Do This series where I share empowering and practical how to guides that will hopefully help you acquire a new lifelong skill.
Hello and welcome to the first instalment of You Can Do This, a series of accessible and practical how to guides anyone can do with the intention of helping us acquire a new lifelong skill.
From growing, making, foraging and preserving food, to reducing waste, upcycling and reusing. To home improvements, gardening, crafts and fixing things. And a lot more in between.
This is part of increasing our skillset and self-reliance, which can be a very empowering act; I talk about this more in The power of self-reliance.
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Growing basil from seed is my perennial failure
In my 15 years or so of growing a range of crops from seed in my very small London garden (with no space for a greenhouse) with respectable degrees of success - from chillies and melons, to purple sprouting broccoli and Bolivian achocha - I have come to the conclusion that is is almost impossible for me to grow basil in the same way.
Over the course of the past decade and a half, I have managed to grow basil from seed a grand total of once. And I’ve tried every single year.
I don’t know what did it, but it was a good year. Great big dark green leaves curling downwards from the weight of their own heft, crowding out the light coming in from my kitchen window, one enough to cover a slice of a beefsteak tomato on its own.
But every other year has resulted in abject failure. I’ve tried sowing indoors, sowing undercover, transplanting, not transplanting, starting earlier, starting later, different varieties, keeping them on a windowsill, keeping them outside - every year I change something to see if I get a different result. I don’t.
They germinate and start growing, but at a glacial pace; they rarely get much larger than a couple of inches before they give up and seemingly come to a complete halt.
Basil likes moist but well drained soil, enough space to grow (they can get big), a lot of direct sunlight and as much heat as you can give it.
Apart from the fact that I’m no gardening expert, I mostly put the failures down to the UK lacking in the latter two, especially in the earlier months of March, April and May when the plants are young and at an important stage of their development.
It simply doesn’t get hot enough early enough for basil to grow well before the cold weather sets in.
But, there is another way that results in repeated harvests for weeks and anyone can do it
I figured there had to be another way. And there is. A so much better and quicker way. It results in a glorious abundance of this wonderful herb in just a few weeks.
I tried two new methods this year and one is the runaway winner - this is the method I’m sharing today. It will be the only way I grow basil from this season onwards.
All you need is a pot of basil from the supermarket and a final place to plant out your basil plants, which could be a box on a sunny windowsill. You don’t even need outside space.
No seed sowing, delicate transplanting or thinning required. Anyone can follow this method, even if you have never grown a single thing in your life; you will likely end up with more basil than you’ll know what to do with.
Following this method, I ended up with 13 bushy basil plants from one pot of supermarket basil and within just a few weeks!
Why does a pot of supermarket basil always die?
You might be thinking, can’t I just buy a pot of basil from my local supermarket, keep it watered and on a sunny windowsill and use that?
For all of us who have tried this, we know that after not very long at all, the leaves start turning yellow, the plants stop growing and the pot of basil dies before you’ve even managed to get two pasta dishes under your belt.
This is because each stem in that small pot is a basil plant in its own right, meaning around 25 plants are crammed into this tiny space. An individual and single basil plant growing with full vigour can get 30cm-45cm tall and half that in width, they need space.
Stuffing so many into such a small area means they compete for the already limited nutrients in the compost, have no room to grow and so quickly fade. Supermarkets sow lots of seed in the pot to give the illusion of health and abundance, completely failing to mention the basil will have no longevity.
You could divide this supermarket plant into 3 or 4 and pot up each piece separately. This was the second method I tried. It worked, to an extent. But it wasn’t nearly as productive or as quick as the method I share below.
Instead, you can use this pot of supermarket basil in a different way. A way that will result in a glorious and ongoing harvest of basil that you can grow outside until the first frosts or inside on a sunny windowsill.
You could follow this method this week and start harvesting within three.