Grow Basil Indoors - Seed To Harvest!

it's winter we only basil for our pizza in this video I'm going to show you how I grow this planet hi welcome back to my grow room my name is Christopher as always today I wanted to make a new video on how to grow basil indoors in the winter time I previously did a video I'll put a link up in your iCard I did a video where I just showed you the end result it was a beautiful plant and it just tasted phenomenally but the thing is that I just talked about how I got there and I never really showed you what I did or what type of soil I used or the lighting situation and tips and tricks around that thing so what I thought I wanted to do now is to just take the next couple of months and just try to to film from beginning to end and see see if we can make a video that is a little bit more descriptive and something that you can take inspiration from if you want to grow your herbs indoor in the wintertime so yeah let's start with a soil I use my own soil mix and that's the same soil that I'm using for for everything except the the hydroponic setup that I have my banana and my fig tree all the plants that I have around here everything here is using the same soil mix and the ingredients are as follows I use my base is cocoa quar it's these coco peat blocks that you buy it's made from shavings from coconuts it doesn't have any nutria nutrients but it's it's a phenomenal base it's light and fluffy and easy to use so that's the base I use I used one part of that and then the next part I use is compost I this time I'm going to use my own indoor compost I've been saving compost and making compost in here in the grow room for four years now I think and I've been using from it all the time and everything that I'm trimming and and whatever I'm doing I'm throwing it in the bin and it slowly composts and yeah you can have indoor compost so it's this rich dark gooey gooey thing and it's just pure gold so what I like to use is this type of indoor compost the the nice thing about this is that I don't have to worry about pests because everything that is in this room is in this one and everything that is in here is in the room already so it isn't any problem but I've been using composted manure and I've been using composted garden scraps from from a garden center you just buy these bags and I've never really had any big problems with pests so I think that's just fine to use I use one part of that and the last thing that I'm using this is kind of just something that I sprinkle in I don't have an exact measure but maybe 1/4 of a part of this and this is vermiculite it's used to improve your quality of the soil and this is perlite and these are two different types of rocky materials that are heated up and they expand and they get really aerated so you can use whichever you choose you could also use both of them I prefer to use vermiculite that's just because perlite tends to float to the top and yeah I'm not a huge fan I'm I will experiment more with using perlite in the future but for now I'm going to stick with vermiculite and you can you can choose whichever is the easiest for you to get a hold of so yeah it's whichever you can get this is what the soil mix looks like after I blended everything okay you're gonna need a pot I'm choosing to grow in this huge pot just because we eat a lot of basil and if you have a small tiny pot and you just have a couple of plants in it it's it's gonna be eaten up before it can ever survive and grow so I choose to grow in a large container also make sure that you have drainage holes in the bottom this this is really important because basil really don't like being over watered so just make sure that you have good drainage in your pot and you should be just fine the soils in the pot now and before we place the seeds just make sure that we tapped down the soil a little bit not too hard but just want to make sure that we make it an even even plane for the seeds to be on top of and the reason for that is especially in this type of planting because we're gonna plant the basil seeds almost like microgreens style we're going to use a ton of seeds just to make sure that we get a thick lush bush and that way you will get more basil for faster in the growing so when we tap down the soil we just make sure that everything is even and it's easier for the seeds to sprout evenly I'm just gonna grab a bag of basil seeds that I have lying around I have so many seeds let's just start with this and see how far we can take it just wanna make sure that we get everywhere and you might say well this really isn't the method for for planting the seeds because every single seed is going to be plant and that's true but the thing is that you you you will use the basil as it grows and then sometimes it's just easier to have too many and just thin them out when you go along and that way you can make sure that everything is nice all the way through and you can harvest any time last step is to just gently put some soil on top and I'm using very very little soil on top and the reason for that is when you're planting so dense the seeds have a tendency to clump together and they they just lift the whole soil and that's a bad thing because so many of the seedlings are going to die from that because many of them just will be exposed to the light and the air too much and that's not good for it so what I'm doing is just gently spraying my soil on top like this and as you can see it's it's it's just a thin thin layer and that's all there is to it last thing to do is to just water I didn't mention but the thing is that when you're especially when you're growing in a large pot like this basil seeds will need water but the thing is that this container contains too much soil for the seeds in the beginning so just make sure that you start with a soil that is a little bit on the dry side that's what I did now and that way when you water now the top part will be watered and as the seeds start to grow and the plants demand more water it's easier to to just backfill with water and make sure that the whole thing gets watered and not stay stagnant with with too much water from the beginning that's all there is to it if you want to cover this with some plastic that's just fine just make sure that you avoid mold if it starts to mold just remove the film and and try to keep some some aeration going I'm not going to cover this because I'm just going to make sure that it stays moist on top and that's really easy when you're growing in a large container like this so the easiest way to avoid fungus is just keep it open and also place this pot until it germinates at least in some place where it's a little bit warm ok the next step is probably going to be sprouting so I'll see you then the seeds sprouted on day seven and this is day nine and you can see it has had a couple of days to to green up and it's really important that you keep the grow light on from this stage and I would of course suggest that you put the grow light on on the exact day that it peeks through the soil that's important because you don't want tall leggy plants growing there and they really require the lighting especially if you have a warm room after about two weeks the canopy was was really dense and it was it was like touching rock when you touched it and it just looked phenomenally at this stage you could of course harvest the whole thing as a micro green but that's not what we're here for but I'm you can harvest some of it as a micro green and just use it and let the rest continue to grow after about 40 days the plant was just just looking phenomenally and it was huge and at this stage you can trim it back you could trim it back all the way let's say you could just keep five centimeter at least at least have one leaf node or two I would guess to leaf nodes and then you can just cut it over there and it will just branch out and continue to grow so this is a beautiful stage of the plant and it's completely mature seven weeks in and this is what we have let's go onto this gotten to the stage where I feel like yeah it's time to end the video about it it's been growing for seven weeks now to the date and it has been producing a lot of basil we've been picking and heating from it all the time and it's it's it's just a time where where you can just sit back and enjoy because this is this is the perfect time for this plant when it gets older it's gonna be a little bit higher and it's gonna start flowering and everything and it's gonna be a constant battle to keep the flowers away I don't like my basil to flower because it tends to get a little bit bitter once it starts to flowers so when you see those flowers just snip them off and yeah you're all good so there's a couple of things that I haven't been mentioning in this video for now and that's watering fertilizing and lighting and these are three really important things but I I just wanted to keep this project going and see what I can can learn from it myself I have been doing this for for a few years now but it's it's it's always fun to try to focus on a project and and to see what kind of method you are ending up using and with with the watering I tend to water this well I really need to water this every single day I haven't been doing that and it has been suffering a little bit from it there's been days where I've gotten up here and it's gone to two and a half days since the last watering and the whole tent just looks completely gone it is yeah all the leaves are just hanging down and and looking gray and anemic but uh you give it some water and it just perch right buttercup that's that's the beautiful thing about basil they really can take under watering so they will just droop and you give them water and they they pop back up again almost all the time but we feel over water this it's not gonna take - good - that the leaves are gonna start going yellow and they're gonna fall off and and that happens fast so many people ask me on my last video why they're basil plant are getting yellow leaves and they're falling off and it's just not looking healthy and my main theory about that is over watering that's that's at least the reason why my basil plants have been turning yellow and dropping leaves but this one if you're growing so many plants like I do in a container like this then it's really hard to get it over water because if you throw in as much as the pot can take it's still gonna be sucked up by the plant so yeah this this is a really forgiving setup and that's that's one of the reasons why I do it because I get a huge yield and also it is really hard to mess it up the fertilizing I mean yeah they're not paying me but I I really really just love this product it's bio-based bio grow it's made from from algae or beans or something something something it is an organic liquid fertilizer and what I do i I just have this squeeze bottle that I use for hot sauce and I just use my watering container a little squirt in there and that's enough I I fertilize every single time that I water and for this plant I would say every single day I would give it half this or 3/4 of this with water and the fertilizing its with liquid organic fertilizers there's I haven't found a way to over fertilize yet and I've been using a lot of this and it's the plants will take what they need and it's just gonna build the soil so it's it's better to over fertilize with this than to under fertilize they they can really take this so I wouldn't be too concerned about it and for measuring I never measured this thing if I'm growing within organics like for my hydroponic setup I'm using inorganic chemical fertilizers and then it's really important to be precise because if you're over fertilizing you're gonna burn the plants and if you're under fertilizing they're really gonna suffer so um but with the organic fertilizer there's yeah just just do whatever you feel like and some plants take better - more fertilizer than others and yeah some don't like too much so yeah it is it's just feel your way into it but I am I would say a little squirt for for every single time that's at least the way that I do it when it comes to lighting I have been using I've been trying different grow lights for this but the main grow light that I've been using is the spider farmer LED I think it's about 100 watts of lighting power and it is it is really almost too much for this type of plant I would say I'm I'm currently working on designing and manufacturing and I I already have some some prototypes in the works making my own grow lights and I'm gonna try to focus on on producing something that it would would do good in this type of situation for for growing basil and and other things that that don't require these huge panels for growing coffee and guavas and fig trees bananas and whatnot so so I'm working on that and I'm going to to make some videos about my setup trying to to perfect the way that I could grow basil and I'm gonna try to grow it inside in the house also in the kitchen just to to see what what kind of situation I could get going that would be perfect for this but for this project I have been using a hundred watt LED panel twelve hours off and twelve hours on and that's the cycle I used for for everything up here it's been working nice for me many people are on my last video are complaining about well duh you're using LED grow lights no wonder you're getting nice plants and that's true that's that's mainly the reason that I'm not doing an a miracle worker it's just it's just me growing under the conditions that I have and the thing is that if you want to grow something like this you're really really gonna need some lighting if you're if you have a south-facing window and you have decent hours of sunlight it's possible I'm not gonna say that it won't work I'm not able to test it because I live in Norway and we don't have Sun this time of the year so I think we're down to half hour of the Sun just peeking over the horizon so yeah it's it's it's not for me in the middle of winter but yeah it's it it will be possible to grow it in a south-facing window but if if you want to grow now remember this is this is a lot of basil this isn't just a small planted to you place in some kind of lighting in your kitchen and and just just have a beautiful basil plant but you you can just pick from it and and like when we go to town we we just pick and pick and pick and just eat chunks of this thing because we love Basil's so it's really important for us to just have all we can eat and if you want to grow something this large you're gonna have to use grow lights and that's just a basic fact so that's what I do with my plant okay I hope I hope this answered some of the questions that I got on my last video and then if you have any just please let me know down in the comments and I'll try to answer them as good as I can I'm starting to get a hang of growing basil and I think it's fun it is it is a nice smelling plant it grows beautifully it grows fast and it's such a good product to have because yeah we just love eating it so this is Christopher saying may the force be with you and me and my basil are out of here [Music]

Channel: Christopher Brandsdal

Views: 152,865

Rating: 4.9103327 out of 5

Keywords: how to grow basil, growing basil, fertilizing basil, growing basil indoors, basil seeds, harvesting basil, how to grow basil from seed, tips for growing basil, complete growing guide, indoor gardening, herb garden, how to grow basil indoors, basil herb, grow basil, how to grow basil from seeds, how to grow basil at home, growing basil indoors in winter, growing basil indoors from seed, growing basil indoors year round, growing basil indoors during winter

Id: KVS2wjoOnDY

Length: 18min 13sec (1093 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 08 2019