Maximize Your Basil Harvest - 3 Mistakes to Avoid

Stacey Murphy here last week we talked about maximizing your tomato harvest because that's one of everybody's favorite topics yeah this week we're talking about maximizing your basal harvest because it goes right along with maximizing your tomato harvest and one basil seedling is enough for one person for the whole season it can produce enough basil for your entire season even for somebody like myself who eats a lot of basil that's if you treat the plant right so herbs they love to be pruned they respond by growing back and double and that's especially true a basil and so often I go to people's gardens and I see small flowering and dying basil plants and this is before people even really know there's a problem so in this quick video on I'm going to talk about keeping your basil plant healthy how to harvest it often and how to handle that basil after harvesting to get the most out of it and basil is kind of like the tomato of herbs bass tomatoes have a little bit of a fragile skin and they require slightly different harvesting techniques and basil is similar it's a it's one of the more fragile of the herbs unlike this giant rosemary bush behind me and so it gets its own video step one is to start with a healthy seedling and what do I mean by that well you want to look for a plant that is dark green on its leaves in its stem that's a sign that the plant is well cared for if you see something that has yellow on the leaves or on the stem or even brown on the stem that's a sign as the plant is dying or not very well taken care of so you don't want that one the second thing to look for is that the plant is short in bushy this means that the plant has received enough sunlight so if you see any plants that look tall and leggy I wouldn't start with those those are not the healthiest seedlings to start with so short and bushy and then the third thing to look for is that I recommend growing basil in clumps and you can grow you know five stems together in a small space and I recommend something between 3 and 5 stems you don't want to grow just one stem it's kind of a waste of space you can grow several stems at once so that's what I mean when I say a healthy seedling step two is knowing when to prune and pruning starts early for a basil plant so basil is a plant that bifurcates and splits into two every time that you cut it so you want to cut often so the first time that you cut the plant is when the stem has about three nodes and nodes are basically the space where new growth is growing out of the stem so just above that third node and it should be about six inches high you're going to clip off the plant and allow the the new growth to grow to new stems step three is to prune often and that means harvesting off often which means eating a lot of basil which is good for us right so what I like to do is I like to harvest weakly so that I have a non-stop supply of basil and when you're harvesting and pruning the basil what's happening is that you're keeping the basil in its vegetative state meaning that it's growing loose instead of growing flowers and the reason that's important is that what a the progression of a plant is that it starts to grow flowers and then those flowers turn to seeds and then the plant starts to die so that's not what you want the basil plant to do you want it to continue to flourish so you want to watch out for two signs that the plant might be moving on to its old age one is that the plant starts to flower and here is what it starts to look like when it's just beginning to flower and then here's what it looks like as the those flowers get a lot larger and eventually what happens is those flowers will start to turn brown and dry up and that's when you know when you need to harvest very deeply in order to continue to get more basil out of the plant it may or may not go do it for you because it may have moved into its old age a sign that the plant has definitely moved into its old age and it's going to be challenging to get any basil out of the plant is when the stem starts to turn yellow or brown that's in its very old age you might as well plant some more basil all right so once you've harvested your basil then what you want to keep it at room temperature you don't want it to cool down too much basil is a very fragile leaf and cold temperatures will start to brown those leaves that's not what you want so what I would recommend is keeping basil in little bouquets on your on your counter top and all I like to do is when I harvest my basil I like to pull off the lower leaves so that I have a stem to put into the water and then I use those lower leaves right away in my first meal and then I keep the other stems in some water to keep that basil fresh for future meals all right that's about it and the three mistakes that I see a lot of people make when they're growing their basil is that they aren't pruning early and often enough and so what that means is that they're not maximizing their yield they're getting small plants that aren't producing a whole lot of leaves and those plants are turning brown at an early age so that's what you want to avoid you want so you want to harvest early and often second mistake I see people make is that they pull the leaves off of the basil plant instead of cutting the stem you always want to cut the stem that's going to double your yield right there and then the third mistake that I see people make is that they store their basil in their fridge and basically the basil goes bad before they can use it so you do you want to avoid that as well and that's it for this video I wish you a plentiful basil harvest this year and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Stacey Murphy

Views: 826,758

Rating: 4.9482045 out of 5

Keywords: yt:quality-high, harvesting basil

Id: Kn0Y4xoMApU

Length: 5min 24sec (324 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 14 2016