How To Grow Basil Indoors - Italian Basil, Lemon Basil, Red Rubin Basil

in this exciting episode I'm going to show you how to grow several types of basil indoors hi everybody I'm Allen Schaefer at custom garden solutions today I'm going to show you how to grow three of my favorite types of basil Italian basil red ribbon basil and a lemon basil basil is part of the mint family and if I'm this interesting some of the other members of the mint family are time lavender lemon balm oregano sweet marjoram and rosemary to name a few a lot of people use basil and spaghetti Pizza pesto or salads I use it all the time in salads and spaghetti and spaghetti I use mostly the Italian basil in salads I add the three types of basil we'll be reviewing today fresh oregano tomatoes then I grate beets and carrots and I add spinach kale beans peas peppers to my salad and I don't even need any salad dressing there are over 60 identified types of basil each of the three types of basil we are growing today have a big taste difference the Italian basil is the most common and used in many dishes it's good for salads spaghetti and pesto it's known as a sweet basil the lemon basil smells like well lemon probably why they call it lemon basil and it has a light citrusy taste of lemon many chefs use it in desserts and drinks like ice tea for instance the red Reuben has reddish purple leaves that look very ornamental and I think they kind of taste like black licorice and they're very pungent now let me put these down I'll put a link to Amazon down below in the description and you can click on these and pick them up pretty inexpensively click the show more if the link is below the fold this is basil that I'll grow indoors and it's going to stay indoors although you can bring it outside if you like the reason is I like to keep a lot of herbs in the house because I use them a lot and I don't want to have to go outside or have to wash them I also like to keep a bunch of plants in the house because it keeps the air fresh clean and healthy before I show you how to grow and care for your basil I want to answer one question is they still good for you generally herbs are power packed with nutrition nutrition ounce for ounce in basil and other herbs can be a hundred times that of your everyday tomato or pepper basil is really good for you and is considered one of the healthiest herbs originally I was going to provide details on nutritional and medicinal benefits of basil in this episode the benefits were so numerous and interesting that I decided they need their own episode sometime in the near future but today I will provide a quick summary so here we go basil helps prevent atherosclerosis atherosclerosis that has to be the word of the day just because it's so big but a thorough sclerosis is a narrowing of artery walls because of plaque it prevents heart attacks and stroke basil has anti-inflammatory effects basil fights breast cancer basil helps prevent and fight heart disease basil has anti anti microbial properties basil eases arthritic pain and basil helps fight stress and as I mentioned more is coming on health benefits in an episode coming soon so there's a couple reasons why you might want to grow a couple different varieties of basil one is that you may want to just have a couple different varieties for the different tastes they offer but studies have found that different varieties have different medicinal and nutritional benefits so you may want to cover all your bases and just eat much more of the different varieties or you may want to eat a specific variety that addresses a specific illness or condition you or somebody you know may have I'll cover all that in an upcoming episode about Basil's medicinal and nutritional benefit the other reason why you may want to grow basil yourself is that it's really expensive in stores and you can see for yourself that it grows really abundantly alright I mean I was at a Walmart the other day and I saw a point seven five ounce container of not so good looking basil cost a dollar ninety eight I mean an ounce of two may cost you four or five dollars and it isn't that good okay as far as what kind of pot or container I use I use an old pretzel container and I drill eight to ten holes in the bottom and what's really cool about this container is that the lid serves as a great saucer on the bottom to either bottom water or if I want to water on top provide drainage you can use just about any type of container but i really suggest something that allows drainage on the bottom if you want this exact container you can go to an Aldi food store and pick one up it's just clancy's pretzel rods and I've got a bunch of these container and they just absolutely work great so I use a soil mixture and I'll put a link to the video I did with that information in the description down below but generally you want nutrient rich well draining soil I'll add some happy frog fertilizer some vermiculite some rock dust some worm teens maybe some peat all into the soil mix as far as sowing the seeds I'm looking to grow five or six plants in this small container now this may seem a little unorthodox but if you look at my results you understand what I'm doing I'm going indoors and I harvest frequently I don't ever want the plant to be 2 or 3 feet high I want them to grow 12 to 18 inches and I want to keep them under the lights I harvest frequently because I eat a lot of basil and it just keeps growing back and this works great for me so just spread some seeds and I oversee it a little bit just take some of the seeds and just spread them through I'm not worried about over seeding okay so I'm trying to get six seven plants in this little area and it says a quarter inch deep but just oversee it a little bit you get a ton of basil seeds in each package just tap it down a little bit then you just want to water them in lightly all right so now we've watered the top remember what I was talking about the container that we had the the lid and the lid basically serves as a drip pan or saucer on the bottom and if you can tell there's about a when you push it to one side it's about three-quarters of an inch of clearance here all right so you don't want to be disturbing the top when the plants are germinating so what I do is I'll water from the bottom like so and I'm just going to put a little water in there and that'll soak up the water through capillary action and it'll keep the top of the soil moist but you won't disturb it when you water it like I did earlier all right so throughout the germination period I'll probably water from the bottom once the germination starts and the plants that are growing then I'll water from the bottom probably 75% of the time and from the top 25% of the time I do want to water from the top and kind of push some of the minerals through nutrients and minerals through and from the bottom is what I do most of the time so just leave these in in direct sunlight until they germinate and that's probably going to be about 7 to 14 days and then once they have germinated you can put them in direct light for at least 6 hours a day I do it for about 16 hours a day but you can probably do a lot less so after your sow your seeds you don't need to put them in direct light until they start to germinate once they start to germinate you want to get them in direct lighting you want to keep the light as close as possible to the plant I'm using LED lights here all right and since LED did not give off a lot of heat basically no heat you can keep it an inch away from the plant so I would have these lights lowered you know all the way down to right over the plant and I would just raise the lights as the plant grew if you don't do that and the light is too far away from the germinating plant you're gonna get a lanky plant because the plants are gonna be searching for that light and they're gonna shoot up and they're not gonna be healthy so again your germinating seeds don't need any direct light once they germinate you want to get the light as close as possible now these are about a month or two old alright and the LED lights are adjustable as you just saw and I just gave all these a trimming so they've been trimmed and they'll be watered so they're gonna shoot up again in the next couple days I check on these about twice a week when I think they may need some watery basil will do great at about 70 to 75 degrees which is the temperature inside my grow room outside they're like 60 to 90 degrees and they'll survive temperatures as low as 40 degrees as long as they're healthy and mature alright so let's talk fertilizer you can use fertilizer if you want but wait until the basil plants have grown a couple of months if you start with a good soil mix you shouldn't have to fertilize for several months I have still not fertilized my basil plants yet and they're about two months old when I do fertilize I use epi frog fertilizer and it's a three for three fertilizer and I'll just add it to water and I'll water it in I'll put a link down below to happy frog and you can check it out in the description so let's talk about harvesting your basil so what you want to do is you always want to pinch from the top so if you see right here you see this main stem alright you want to pinch this off and make it even a little closer right where it what goes to a why here I'm actually gonna go down a little deeper but you want to pinch right in front of that alright I'm gonna give this a pretty good haircut here and here's another good example here's another good example hopefully you can see that so I'm going to do here's a main stub and here's where a couple branch a couple are branching out cut it right there here's one on the top that isn't too bad [Music] cut it right there I actually need a little basil for a big salad I made so we'll just continue to clip a couple all right so look at that I mean I've got a ton of basil what I just clipped in a store is probably about four or five dollars worth nothing's gonna lay these down here for now but I wanted to show you this is an Italian basil just put this down here for now this this my friends is a red Reuben and one of the nice things about these pretzels containers is they have a little label on top you get right right on top of it so I've got one two three four five six looks like about seven growing in here and and when I said you're gonna put five to seven plants in this size they'll take care of themselves the seedlings will be crowded out or shaded out from the ones that are more healthy that grow faster and they'll eventually just die or you can pull them out or cut them out so this is a red Reuben and I wanted to give update a real close up close to look at this for you let me move the camera see these flowers see that all right so these are flowering and what I'm gonna do is you just want to cut these off where they're flowering or below where they're flowering and you want to get them all and even if you're not harvesting if you don't need them you need to just but once a week or so just check and cut off any of the buds when they're flowering all right so you want to pinch off all the bugs like I just did because flowering is going to inhibit or stop your foliage growth and it's also going to dilute the taste in the leaves because all the energy has been going to the to the flower so you want to make sure you pinch off the flowers if you don't pinch off the flowers it sends a signal to the plant that it's reproduced and no more foliage is needed by pinching back the flowers you play a little trick on your basal plant you trick it into thinking that it still needs to make flowers or seeds and to reproduce and therefore you'll continue to get great foliage and great basal leaves to eat all right so we got the red Reuben I'll put it up here for now and the last one we have is the lemon basil and only the red Reuben really is flowering quite a bit this lemon basil looks like I have one two three four five six plants in here we got a seventh that's trying to come up the side I'll let that go but for this I'm just going to give it a little bit of a haircut so let me get over here all right so I'm just going to cut this one lightly I don't need much more basil got here a little bit all right so again another three three four dollars worth of basil and here's the tip of the day and it has to do with watering you want to wait until your plant begins to sag and droop then you water and a couple hours later it's going to look really good now this plant is healthy so it doesn't need water and and the leaves aren't sagging or drooping but too much water and the leaves on the bottom may start to turn yellow and this plant doesn't have that problem too much water and the plant can't breathe basil does not like wet feet I water these when I see the leaves are drooping and sagging which turns out to be about twice a week for some reason if you want to end the life of your plant and you want to save the leaves for seasoning you cut the entire plant at soil level turn it upside down hang it in a warm dry room for about a week then strip the leaves from the stems and store them in an airtight container for up to a year don't crumble the leaves until you're ready to use them if you can avoid it and last a cooking tip when adding basil to cook dishes like spaghetti wait until just before the spaghetti sauce is done cooking to add the basil for the strongest flavor and the best texture hey everybody I'm Allan Shafer at custom garden solutions our channels all about helping you grow herbs and vegetables all kinds of cool garden stuff so that you can live a healthier and happier life if you're new to the channel and you want to learn all about growing herbs and vegetables and all kinds of cool garden stuff start today by subscribing and then so you don't miss anything hit the notification bell so you know when we release a new episode because you never know what I'm going to be talking about next 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Channel: CustomGardenSolutions

Views: 7,057

Rating: 4.7906976 out of 5

Keywords: How to grow basil, how to grow basil indoors, italian basil, red rubin basil, lemon basil, harvesting basil, basil herb, grow basil, italian basil plant, basil plant, basil seeds, how to grow basil from seed, tips for growing basil, sweet basil, basil germination, italian large leaf basil, fertilizing basil, custom garden solutions, organic, spacing basil, basil grow lights, how to plant basil, how to harvest basil, how cook basil, mrs burns lemon basil, genovese basil

Id: ZE9q3gxP6as

Length: 21min 9sec (1269 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 06 2018