Growth and Care of Basil
Photo courtesy of MewnBeam at flickr.com.
Soil and water requirements for basil plants
Basil seems to prefer a lighter (or sandy) soil, but will grow in raised beds or clay soil that is well-composted and well-drained. Well drained soil is absolutly essential for a happy, healthy basil. During the growing season, most basil plants prefer warm temperatures (above 55 at night) and moist, well-drained soil as they tend to perform poorly in cold, wet conditions. Basil is somewhat forgiving about soil pH (acidity and alkalinity) and will tolerate a range of about 5.5 to 8. A local nursery professional or university extension agent can help you determine if the soil conditions are right for your plant.
In milder summer climates, a generous watering can easily last most basils planted in beds for several days. However, basils grown in arid regions or climates with hot summers will happily soak up daily sprinklings with your garden hose. When planting in hot and dry areas, it’s a good idea to protect your basil plants from as much stress as possible:
Fertilizer requirements
Keeping your plants well-fertilized is important, but to avoid fungal and bacterial wilts, you should not feed at temperatures below 60 degrees. Basil tends to like a variety of fertilizers, but it performs best with organic or slow-release fertilizers. Worm-casting tea, compost tea and Garrett Juice all make great basil fertilizers. A strong application of any fertilizer will make the plant more susceptible to insects and diseases.
Additionally, fast-release or artificial fertilizers should be avoided as they will give the plant an undesirable flush of growth that may not be as tasty. Think of artificial fertilizer as plant junk food!
If starting from a transplant, make sure you give your plant a dose of liquid seaweed and a root-stimulating fertilizer such as HastaGro Plant Food or Garrett Juice. Under the right growing conditions you can expect a four-inch transplant to attain an easily harvestable size in approximately one month. It can be pinched back for culinary use sooner, but take care not to get eager and snip too much!
How to Plant Basil
Most basil is easily propagated by cuttings. In fact, cuttings are an excellent way to sustain a favorite basil plant from one growing season to the next. Just make sure the soil mix is well-drained and not too rich as a richly composted medium may encourage rot.
Most of the culinary basils should be planted about 12-15 inches apart. The distance between ornamental basils will depend on the variety and type, but most ornamentals need significantly more room to reach their full potential. Because basil does not withstand foot traffic well, you should select a planting spot far from the path of garden guests or pets.
To give your outdoor basil a jump-start, solarize the soil. This may sound technical, but it really isn’t. Just spread some clear plastic over the planting area, weight down its edges and let the soil bake for two to three weeks. To give your basil seeds an earlier start indoors, use a bottom heat source in your seed tray to trick your plants into coming up early.
If starting from seeds, you should water the seed tray with a liquid seaweed solution. Liquid seaweed has a lot of natural growth stimulants and micronutrients that your seedlings will appreciate. Also, you should use a soil additive that contains a high phosphate content such as soft rock phosphate. The available phosphate within these additives is very important to the development of seedlings.
At 7 to 14 days, your seedlings should start to appear. However, keep in mind that seeds will germinate only in warm soil above 55 degrees. If planning seeds outdoors, wait until late spring when temperatures are above 60 degrees. You should be able to harvest green leaves from seed in approximately six weeks. You should not harvest your plant until it is at least four inches tall with a minimum of six mature leaves, but don’t take more than half of them.
Basil Diseases, and How to Avoid Them
Again, well-drained soil is essential to the success of your basil and probably the best preventive action you can take against common soil-borne fungal diseases such as pythium wilt (damping off) and fusarium wilt. Fungal and bacteria wilts are best avoided by planting and growing properly.
Because little can be done to reverse the effects of such diseases, prevention is really the key. As seedlings are especially susceptible to fungal diseases, starting with transplants from your local nursery can also help you avoid fungal wilts. Ensuring adequate air circulation can also help stave off unwanted diseases. Dusting soft rock/colloidal phosphate on the surface of the soil and incorporating it into the potting mixture of seed trays and pots can also prevent the spread of pythium wilt.
If a batch of these rotten fungi or bacteria pops up, there are a few things you can do. Horticultural cornmeal works on a variety of soil-borne fungal diseases. Garlic fungicide spray can work on many disease and insect problems. Sprays made of whole milk (no, I am not kidding!) will sometimes kill the offending disease. Also, cedar flake and hardwood mulch have been somewhat successful at preventing wilt and foliar disease. However, an over abundance of mulch in seed trays (more than one-tenth of one inch) can prevent your basil plants from coming up. Sometimes these remedies don’t work, and starting over is the best option.
Basil Pests, And How to Avoid Them
Most of the insects that attack basil are caused by water stress, cold or cool weather, not enough sunlight or poor drainage. Here are a few solutions to the most common insect hordes:
{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
Thank you. Basil is one of the most difficult for me to sustain. Slug which you did not cover being a problem, but maybe because I have been overwatering? :>)
thanks for the wonderful write up.
it’s the best article about growing basil which i have seen yet
thank you
i growing vegetables in my yard (9 M) e.g. basil, penny, Radish, pepper
and i will be happy to know more about vegetables so if you have knowledge about another vegetables could you send to my email or
show in your website .
again thank you
I was looking for some basic tips on growing basil. I have never grown herbs before. I have no idea HOW to “pinch”, or what that even means… or WHEN to pinch. I’m just the average person wanting to grow some basil for cooking! Every website that I go to is soooo in depth that I cannot understand the basics or what I am to do to be a successful basil grower. Your information is good…but if I had the knowledge that you suspect that I do based on your article….I would not be searching the internet for information on how to grow basil! I’m extremely frustrated. I have 2 basil plants that I bought at the store. Transplanted them into 2 other pots…and just want to know in simple language and terms how to care for and harvest them. I am ready to give up! I even googled “Basil growing for dummies” and your site popped up. This is definitely NOT the site for dummies.
@Kim
Thanks for your feedback. I’ll take that into account and see if we can work to make the site clearer for beginning gardeners.
I might suggest searching YouTube for videos about growing Basil, because perhaps some of them might demonstrate the technique. It’s really as simple as grabbing the flowering part between your finger and thumb and pinching it completely off like you’re pulling off a leaf.
Kim, I share your frustration on trying to learn the basics of growing basil!
lars, I did find this site to be very helpful, especially that last paragraph in your comment! Just what I needed – an easily understandable explanation of which part to pinch off of the plant! Thank you!
Good points from Kim, although not lars’s fault necessarily what Google searches this page comes up under, if the level seems a mite too technical!!
As store-bought plants, basil is quite hard to keep going successfully, I find too Kim and Ashley – best thing is not to expect a long period of use from any one pot, necessarily…! It may be worth repotting into larger container(s) than the plants came in, as realistically there’s not going to be nearly enough room for the crowd of seedlings you get in one of those. Each one could probably use a few inches of space to its neighbour, rather than a few millimetres as is often the case when you get them.
I’d had the impression that basil likes it hot and dry, with some shop-bought plants saying on them not to water until the leaves start to wilt each time. In fact, it will tolerate/enjoy more frequent watering, it’s just that the most important thing seems to be good drainage – basil doesn’t cherish being soggy or being left standing in water for any extended period. If the soil feels dry then I’d always go ahead and give it a splash; if it’s still damp then you probably needn’t bother for another day or two.
Keep it somewhere pretty sunny – they like a kitchen windowsill, though apparently enjoy more humidity than one might expect; on BBC TV’s ‘Gardeners’ World’ a couple of weeks ago it was noted that they thrive in the same warm and humid conditions as tomatoes, hence growing both side-by-side in a greenhouse can work very well as if one is doing well then the other generally will be! (They will grow outdoors, obviously, in the right climate – though here at least in the UK I fear it’s not consistently hot enough except in the far south, and I’d be far too worried about them being ravaged by slugs to try it, unless in a high pot with some kind of deterrent like a ring of copper tape around the outside.)
If it’s on a windowsill or similar, stand the pot in a saucer, and any excess water that drains through can be removed after a short while if it isn’t soaked up fairly quickly; the best thing is to water near the middle part of the day, as you’ll find that a smallish surplus tends to be quickly ‘drunk’ when the plant is hot in the sun, and/or evaporates off – which will also give the local humidity a nice temporary boost. While I’ve been typing this (late morning) I’ve actually put the current kitchen basil out in the rain – it’s been coming down quite lightly but steadily for an hour or two – for a shower and a drink, and have just retrieved it in time for the sun to come out and warm it up again back on its sill.
“Pinching out” is (as mentioned) a form of pruning, by simply using a finger and thumb as pincers to neatly take softish shoots off any plant, rather than resorting to some sort of blade. You can use your nail(s) to do this particularly sharply, if you like. It’s a good technique as you can be very precise with where you pinch, and can do so with much greater feel and care than is possible with some mechanical implement like scissors or secateurs. This is why it’s so often the recommended method for encouraging bushiness in delicate young plants – such as potted basil. Basically, if the stem is soft enough to sever cleanly with your bare hands, then this is as good a method as any; with the basil, I generally give a gentle exploratory pinch, and if it resists then I’ll use kitchen scissors instead to avoid yanking the plant about and damaging it and its fellows.
The principle is the same as with any pruning: the idea is to get your fingertips in right at the base of any given section of stalk, i.e. immediately above a pair of leaves, where hopefully the basil will be producing extra, small new leaves already. That way, when you detach the growth above this point, you don’t leave a stub of bare stalk that may be prone to disease – or, at least, will certainly die off and won’t produce any new growth. By pinching out taller stems in this way, the plant is encouraged to produce two new shoots (those small new leaves) from each junction where an old one has been removed, leaving it both more compact and more bushy – and giving you more future leaves to pick in the weeks to come!
Hope that’s of some help, anyway… Good luck with your basil!
So, how do I encourage growth? Do I let it flower so that the seeds will spill into the soil? Also, how do I keep my plants from becoming woody? If I pinch all the way down will this keep them from becoming woody?
Wow, fantastic post!! (and replies, thank you everyone!) I, too am a new-comer in gardening, but this depth of knowledge is fantastic to have as I get further into it all… especially the tip on solarizing, that’s such an awesome thought–
Thank you thank you!
Please tell me what to do with my basil. I live in a condo in S. FL and have a pot on my patio. It gets great sun and I keep it watered correctly. But…I HAVE TINY TINY BLACK BUGS ON MY PLANTS AND I don’t know what to do. They just suck the life out of my beautiful plants. I have so far only shook the plants all the time and tried to kill the varmints, but of course they come back. Are they in the soil or air borne? Any help anywhere? Thanks and enjoyed the reads.
@Elizabeth
I like organic products that contain Spinosad. They are safe for vegetable and herb crops. I also like Veggie Pharm.
http://www.cleanairgardening.com/veggiepharm.html
Don’t spray anything on your plants during the heat of the day, because it can burn them. Spray in the evening or early morning.
Lars, thank you so much for the web site. Went there and will do.
Once again, thanks for response. God Bless, Elizabeth
Please help! I have a pot of beautiful looking basil that has just recently started getting light and dark zig-zag like patterns on the leaves. My best guess is that they are due to a parasite. But none of the common basil pests i can find describe this kind of mark on the plant. It kind of looks like something is eating through the inside of the leaf in a random path. I don’t see any bugs on the plant and have been pinching off the leaves that look like this. But new ones keep appearing. Does anyone know what this might be?
I started a small herb garden and also a vegetable garden but living in the deep south w/ high humidity and triple digit heat, the only thing that has survived is the basil. I guess it thrives well in these conditions but I can’t seem to grow anything else.
I have a container garden on my balcony and the basil and chives do very well..enough for me to cook with them almost daily. I’ve been thinking of planting the basil into a hanging vertical garden I made. It’s the fabric type with about 10 pockets. If anyone has advice on how to take sprigs from my current basil plant and use that to start new plants in the hanging unit, i’d be grateful. I want to plant about 4 or 5 hopefully by the end of the growing season which is probably about mid september here.
Repotted a beautiful looking Basil plant, but a month or so down the line the leaves are very wilty. I’m wondering if I didn’t loosen the roots enough, and if I should repot once more? I only water when the soil drys out, and it perks up a bit them, but doesn’t last. It tends to dry out quickly, btw.
Hi, I have no luck with plants and I had some basil on my back deck in Charleston that was doing well but then it started to grow some sort of white fuzz and was dying. The white fuzz took over and killed my plant. I moved the pot closer to the door on the back deck next to my pot of oregano and now my oregano has the white fuzz of death on it too! Does anyone know what this could be. The fuzz stands off the plants like individual short white hairs.
Is it because of too much water?
It’s like tomato. It starts growing fungus (white) on top when it’s too damp.
Happened to my basil plant too at first, but I removed it. It never came back but the black fungus now is killing my plant.
I have been growing basil in a pot on my kitchen windowsill for over a year and it has been flourishing and doing well. My problem is over the last 3-4 weeks i have found little flies in the soil and around the plant and the smaller stems of the plant are wilting and dying. Please help as i love my little basil plant.
HELP————I BOUGHT A BASIL FROM THE GROCERY—IT DID WONDERFUL OUTSIDE IN WISCONSIN———-I TOOK IT IN THE HOUSE AND NOW SOMETHING IS EATING THE LEAVES—THOUGH I DON’T SEE ANYTHING. ALSO—THE STEM’S OF THE BASIL HAVE TURNED BROWN. PLEASE TELL ME WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE INFECTION & SHOULD I JUST THROW OUT THE PLANT? IS SOMETHING UNDER THE GROUND THAT IS EATING MY BASIL? PLEASE HELP