Basil Care Guide - Pruning, Pests, and Disease

what is going on everyone welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the mi Gardner Channel I'm really excited for today's video so I hope you guys are as well because we're down in the grow room and we're gonna be talking about how to properly prune your basil how to properly prune your basil almost sounds like a tongue twister there um so we're gonna talk about how to properly prune your basil today because it's been something that a lot of you have have asked and it seems like a pretty common reoccurring topic that you all have asked in the comment section of our Instagram posts our facebook posts and even in shots where they work the topic of the video but they were like in the background we were talking about how to how to hand pollinate your zucchini and it seemed like five or ten questions we're just all about the basil in the background so I figured I would at least answer those questions because it seems like a lot of you want me to do a video about basil so the first thing that a lot of you have voiced concern over is Luke my plants have gotten really lanky they've kind of gotten just kind of mangy and are falling all over the place they're not bushy and healthy like yours are well let me tell you for the past three weeks I have not proved these basil plants specifically so that I could do a pruning guide and so I'm glad you guys asked about the mangy plants because basil will inherently get mangy it will inherently get really top-heavy and so you kind of read my mind on that one that was actually already in the works and that's why I hadn't been pruning these but they do get mangy and so pruning them is gonna fix that I'm gonna show you how to properly prune them the next thing is Luke my plants have stopped growing entirely what can I do and or what am I doing wrong or should I just pull them out the answer is no no do not pull your plants out do not pull your plants out there is something that you can do and it's called pruning so fruiting is not only gonna fix how mangy and top-heavy they are but it's also gonna fix their growth problem you see basil is a woody stemmed herb and woody stemmed herbs have the ability to produce side growth basically like if you top a tomato plant that tomato plant won't just stop growing it's gonna produce more side shoots basil is very much the same basil and peppers are very much the same way and so when you prune the tops the top primary growth it doesn't just say alright well I guess I'm done growing it's then going to reroute that energy and push out more growth in other places and so that really allows you to increase the growth so we're going to talk about how to how to properly top your plants so that they actually encourages more growth and that will also do another thing that will also increase the center of gravity it will actually make your plants bushier and more stable so it goes back to the first concern so they kind of two are looped together and then we're also going to talk about some pest issues and some powdery mildew issues so we're gonna talk about you know what might be eating your basil we've had a quite a few different people that have shown their basil plants getting munched on and so I have some thoughts and theories on that and how to prevent it and then I also have some people that have been posting about diseases like powdery mildew so we're gonna talk about how to prevent powdery mildew on your basil as well because that one again very easy fixes on all of those so let's talk about the first one which is the center of gravity issue because I think that's that's probably one of those popular ones you'll basil they just get so tall if you don't maintain them and then all it takes is one strong wind and they're on the ground so even these ones here because they're in netcups they don't have a whole lot of support there they really have no center of gravity they're just falling all over the place so what we're gonna use words come on here and I'm gonna show you just how to prune these so let's go alright so as you can see this basil plant is looking a little worse for wear I mean it looks great don't get me wrong this stuff is absolutely incredibly healthy but it is just falling all over the place I mean there's just no point to even standing this thing up it just falls over one second later and so what you'll notice with these plants is that they produce these well they produce these really long side stems that unfortunately just get they get really they get really easily snapped one strong wind and breaks off almost the whole plant so what we want to do is we want to come in here and we want to really prune these back this is something that you really should be doing on a weekly basis as basil gets this big you can be pruning your basil on a weekly basis and what that's going to do is it's going to encourage the plant to actually be much lower to the ground it's gonna take off all this really heavy girls I mean this is a lot of woody growth that is I mean that's a substantial amount of weight on that planet then we're gonna come in here we're gonna come in and we're gonna prune this one when you come in here we're gonna prune this one and a lot of people are afraid to do this but look at how stable this plant is now I mean this plant is really really stable and all I have to do to really stabilize this because it's in a it's in a hydroponic system it just takes some some little clay ball some little clay balls and put them around the base and that's really gonna fix most of that issue but if this was in ground I mean this would be even more stable and basal is just such a easy plant to prune I mean you don't have to worry about really pruning off too much I think this was so nice about pruning basil is that a lot of people you know people overthink it a lot of people worry about pruning off too much and hurting the plant but as you can see I mean I'm coming here I'm lopping off like 2/3 of this plant and I can guarantee you that in a week you want to be able to tell if this plant was pruned it's gonna be right back to where it was and so I'm just coming in here and I'm just taking all of that growth back because look at how stable these plants are now the next thing you have to do is you have to prune the flowers this solves one of the biggest problems that a lot of people have is their basil stops growing entirely if you take your basil and you simply cut back some of the flowers you don't have to lock the entire plant back but sometimes during hot weather your basil will start to go to flower as you'll see the leaves get smaller and they start forming what's what's known as as flower leaflets these leaflets are actually the beginnings of the flowers and that's why people say well my my leaves are just getting smaller but I don't see any flowers shortly after after they start producing all these leaflets that's when the flowers will form and so they're not formed yet the flowers are not formed yet but they're gonna form very very soon with all these leaflets and so as the leaves get smaller and smaller and smaller you want to prune them off you'll notice here again the leaves start out larger you get smaller smaller smaller smaller smaller and that's where those those leaflets form so pruning those off it's gonna do you a huge service of just reducing the flowering because when a plant flowers it actually starts prioritizing the flowers over production because the flowers then lead to seeds and the seeds our future generations this plant has no interest in producing foliage all year long its end goal is to produce seeds every plants job is to produce seeds so it can reproduce and so what we need to do is we need to come in here and we need to regularly prune these plants back now obviously I'm gonna lop them off quite dramatically I'm gonna take them back like I said about two-thirds but if you don't have two-thirds of the plant to chop off but it's just starting to flower cut it back still get those flowers gone so that can continue to flower for you so I'm just coming in here I'm gonna I'm hacking all these back and and it's really going to do an immense amount of help for my overall plant health and you could see I mean these plants are so small now from where they were and that's because they were just so overgrown but again here here's another example it's one right here see how see the leaves taking it real close see how the leaves start out they go a smaller smaller smaller smaller smaller smaller smaller that's the plant going to seed and so it's really that simple to decrease the the wobbliness the link enus to increase the center of gravity to increase the overall production of your plant and to encourage future growth it's very very simple and I really hope that you guys just kind of see from this video just how simple it is you know I know a lot of people tend to overcomplicate things but this is certainly not one you should be over complicating very very simple a side note to I have been getting a ton of basil and we're talking I probably have I would say two or three pounds of basil at minimum from all my harvesting so that's really exciting I'm definitely gonna be definitely enjoying this for a long time so getting all this stuff harvested and getting the plants looking great again the final thing I did want touch on was pests and disease a lot of you have shown some pictures of things that are eating your basil there are only a few things that I know of that eat basil one of those is grasshoppers there's not a whole lot that you can do to prevent against grasshoppers you can use a product called tool it's a basic like a fine fabric that they make tutus out of tulle is just this really fine mesh fabric and you can use that to drape over your plants but the you know the best thing that I can recommend is to just keep your plants really healthy generally from all the pictures that I've seen generally the the the grasshoppers when they're you know when they're tasting things in the garden they will they will nibble on stuff that might not normally be a food source for them but they're just kind of testing the waters they're seeing what they might be able to eat and so in a lot of cases they'll nibble on some leaves and people will panic because they see the you know the the nibble marks in their leaves but the whole plant is not being decimated so if you're really worried if you're super worried use something like tool it's very difficult you can't use like a spray on them because there are any organic sprays that are gonna prevent against grasshoppers the other one that it may be is slugs slugs when you're growing in damp conditions slugs they will they'll munch on leaves you know that again just like grasshoppers they might not know they might not normally munch on and so in damp really wet cold conditions you can get some slug damage but usually once things warm up you know get get warm again things kind of dry out the slugs pretty much kind of go away or they stick to plants that are a little more their type of food slugs don't really prefer to go really tall up on plants they don't they don't do the much of that and so when you have your plants that are growing off of the ground they'll prefer things like lettuce that's kind of touching the ground if your plants are pruned up from the from the ground and they're not all sitting on the ground you're not gonna have many issues with slugs so just - that kind of come to our mind I have never really had massive problems with with pests on my basil so I'm not an expert on telling exactly what it is especially if you don't see the past and you just see the damage it's very difficult to kind of speculate what it might be but those are my two best guesses and then finally I want to talk about powdery mildew very very simple to eradicate powdery mildew especially on basil so basil the thing that's nice is that it has and it's very smooth leaves so it's very difficult for powdery mildew to colonize the surface of the leaves it's very much different from say something really rough and and and textured like say a zucchini leaf or a pumpkin leaf or like squash leaves things like that or cucumbers or even things like tomato leaves that texture is really what allows the back or the fungi which is the fungus from the the powdery mildew it allows that to colonize on really rough surface leaves in really humid really muggy conditions they can colonize things like like basal but your best your best preventative measure is to simply spray them down with a light baking soda solution you see when the leaf surface is really smooth like it is on basil the there's not a whole lot for them to colonize and so even the lightest acidic solution like baking soda that that acidic solution is going to actually create a inhospitable environment for the powdery mildew to colonize on and they're simply gonna dye it and go away and so all I recommend doing is taking one tablespoon of baking soda to a gallon of water shaking that up and spraying it on the plants seeing what that does first before you up the quantity you can go up to three tablespoons per gallon of water but I always recommend starting at one tablespoon and working up if it's ineffective because the worst thing you can do is go to three tablespoons and then cause some damage to the leaves because it can sometimes burn the leaf the the surface of the leaf if it's too strong so especially if it's really sunny out and things like that so just use that as a as a preventative measure to knock down the powdery mildew on your basil and you should be fine it's really really simple to eradicate so I hope you guys enjoyed I hope you learn something new and I really do hope that you try green basil it is such a rewarding plant to grow so I hope you guys enjoyed and as always this is Luke from the mi Gardner channel reminding you to grow big or go home and oh one more very exciting thing we're actually gonna be starting a podcast the podcast is called the seeds the day podcast it is not yet on the air but we have everything kind of set in place and that's gonna be coming probably later on in this month so you follow follow our Facebook page or or just the YouTube community tab I'll be posting some stuff as we get closer to the launch of that so you guys can listen in to two another way to kind of just get your gardening fixed so I hope you guys enjoyed I hope you learned something new we'll catch y'all later see ya bye and in case you guys were wondering how much basil I got from my basil garden this is how much I got right here this is about 7 to 8 pounds of basil this is a 27 gallon tote that's filled about 2/3 of the way with basil absolutely incredible and so this is gonna be this is gonna be great cannot wait to put these ends of pizzas

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 68,935

Rating: 4.9154496 out of 5

Keywords: Migardener, basil, Premiere_Elements_2018, how to, growing basil, how-to, harvesting, care guide

Id: 0EI9tVpT9hY

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 10 2020