basil in the garden

I’m harvesting lots and lots of genovese basil from the garden these days!

In this photo, such healthy looking transplants were waiting for me in the greenhouse this May.
I start a lot of these in the spring. They’re a favourite at the Farmer’s Market and I sell tons of transplants to folks like me who want to grow their own basil and fulfill their dreams of lots of delicious summer-time pesto.

Here I am transplanting some of those baby basils from their pots into the outdoor growing bed in my garden. I start the seeds in trays and then transplant them to their own pots when they have their first true leaves and are about an inch tall. They grow on in these pots in the seed starting greenhouse until it’s warm enough to plant them outside.

When I have all the little plants transferred from their greenhouse pots to the soil, I give them some good waterings with a kelp tea. I water them with kelp tea occasionally all summer long….it really seems to make them grow faster and greener. At planting time I also add some complete organic fertilizer that I mix up myself (for basil, I add more seed meal for nitrogen and less bone meal). It’s the same mix I use for spinach because I’m wanting to encourage the green growth with nitrogen and want to discourage flowering (and since the bone meal’s phosphorous content encourages flowering, I want to give less of that to the basil)……for more on complete organic fertilizer, see: this post

Looking lovely, all planted, topped up with compost and hoops covered with plastic to try to make our springtime this year a little warmer for Basil, who likes it hot.

….but….not only was the beginning of June too cold in my garden for outdoor grown basil, the earwigs got to it and munched away on the tender new growth… check it out: basil heartbreak! Yellowy from the cold (because I was impatient and thought I could take the plastic off before it was really time)…and sad and ragged from earwig munching….
and this…hrrrummph, not very appetizing at all! So I decided to put the plastic back on the hoops and just wait and see…..

….and my hope-fullness was rewarded! It finally warmed up and the earwigs just…went away! I did nothing. I wonder what happened in the basil patch that I don’t know about that made my hopes and dreams come true. Sometimes it’s all such a mystery.
So now the plastic is off for easy access when harvesting and it’s happily growing like crazy!I just can’t get enough of the look of these beautiful green basil tips…
This photo above shows where the tip has already been harvested a couple weeks ago (brown stubby thing) and where I’m harvesting another tip and where the new shoot is beginning to develop, for harvesting in a couple weeks!….my basil plants get gloriously bushy if I continue to pinch the tips like this…long ago, when I first grew basil, I didn’t understand how important it is for production to keep pinching the tips. I’ve since learned that it inspires the plant to grow more green shoots as it tries to produce seed (it’s ultimate goal)…but we want the green so…never let it do what it’s doing below….sending out a flower shoot!! oh. oh. Well…some in the garden are ok, I suppose, since the bees love them but I want the plants to make more leaves so I can make more pesto…and also, the bigger flower buds give the basil a bitter taste (don’t want that!)…..Below, some basil all bagged up in 2 oz. bags waiting to be delivered to Happy Tides Health Food store so some of the folks who live here and aren’t growing their own can make some pesto too…..yum yum!