Hey Gardenerds, let's talk about basil. It's the quintessential summer herb.
It's an annual, which means that it lives out its life cycle in a season and then sends up flower
stalks, bolts to seed, and then dies. I'm Christy Wilhelmi from Gardenerd. Today I want to talk
to you about this crazy idea about pinching basil because not everybody gets it right.
First up, let's talk about the act of pinching basil. It is supposed to serve two functions.
First of all, it stops the plant from bolting to seed, which can often change the leaf flavor
to something a lot more pungent and bitter that you don't really want. Secondly, and this is the
part that people often don't realize, is that it if you pinch it in the right place it changes the
plant's energy, chemical energy of where it's sending energy, and it will start to produce
more leaves. And the reason why I say, "if you do it right" because most of the time in gardening books
the way pinching basil is described is only serving one of those two functions. So let's
break it down. First up, let's take a close-up look at how basil grows. It has a main stem and
then it has leaves and in between the main stem and those leaves, as you can see here, it makes two
little baby sets of leaves in each corner, at each junction, and then it continues up the main stem
and does the exact same thing 90 degrees opposite, and so on and so forth.
Most of the time when you see instructions for pinching basil they're talking, they're
encouraging you to just go to the very tip of the basil and pinch off the seed stock that has formed.
Not so much. All that does is stop the seeds from producing but it does nothing
to encourage new growth. Let's break that part down. If you look here you can see I've got stem,
this main stem and on either sides of the main stem are two leaves and then at the junction
of the main stem and those two leaves are two more sets of leaves that are growing from it.
When you pinch basil the idea in order to encourage growth is to pinch right above those
new sets of leaves, because that's going to trigger them to grow and it's going to make you a bushier
more vibrant plant. So you can easily pinch back in a number of places. Let's take a look at that.
On this branch I could choose to pinch back right here at the top, or down here right above
these two sets of leaves, or down here as low as here right above these two sets of leaves.
Oh hey, Mittens, look who's here. Mittens is here everybody. Hi come on in. Somebody called you obese
which is ridiculous. Anyway. So you can see how just pinching off those little flowers
forming at the top doesn't help you with the second part, which is making more basil. I wanted
to set the record straight so you can enjoy more basil this summer. It's important also to
remember that basil is an annual which means it is going to die at some point.
At some point the flowers will overtake you. You won't be able to keep them at bay.
And you'll have very few leaves left on the plant. That's okay. It's natural. It's
what basil is supposed to do. So it's not your fault, you didn't do anything wrong. So that's it.
For more information on growing your own food and fabulous herbs like basil go to Gardenerd.com and
be sure to check out my book on growing vegetables Gardening for Geeks. If you want help about growing
fruit check out my new book Grow Your Own Mini Fruit Garden and of course consider becoming a
Patreon subscriber to support all the free stuff that we do here at Gardenerd. Happy gardening!