no need to step outside…
Basil in winter, on your kitchen table. Image by Jill Mead from Sweet Peas for Summer
Having had trouble with growing basil from seed in the past, the discovery that I could divide a bought pot of supermarket basil quite easily and get all the floppy green leaves I wanted, stopped me from trying for a while, until, in the midst of moving house in the winter of 2010, I came across a forgotten packet of seed and decided to give it another go. This time it worked beautifully and I’ve been growing basil in my kitchen ever since. It’s a lovely thing to have in the middle of the table ready for sprinkling over food for the ultimate taste of summer.
You will need:
A packet of basil seed
A terracotta pot with its own saucer
Some seed compost - This can either e ready-made or you can mix peat-free mulit-purpose compost with a handful of horticultural grit.
A compost sieve (not essential but good)
A squirty bottle to emit a fine mist on your seeds to keep them moist
Method
Fill your pot with seed compost and tap it down gently. Water the compost thoroughly by leaving the whole pot to soak in a tray of water until you can see that the surface is wet.
Now scatter your seeds thinly on the surface of the damp compost. By ‘thinly’ I mean that you want to aim for a spacing of about once seed every half centimetre. Obviously this is impossible to do - I just put it here to give you an idea of what ‘thinly’ means!
Cover the seeds with about half a centimetre of sieved compost (if you don’t have a sieve just crumble the compost between your fingers and make sure there are no big lumps. Firm it all down gently and dampen the top layer with your squirty bottle.
Put the whole thing inside your kitchen windowsill, or somewhere warm and as bright as possible.
Be patient and remember to keep spraying the surface of the compost with water.
When the little seedlings appear, let the m grow on , thinning them out by pinching out the weaker looking seedlings if you see tow or more plants squashed together in the same bit of earth. You may want to take this opportunity to sow another pot of basil in order to keep the good stuff coming, with no gaps in your basil abundance.
Once each plant has six or eight leaves, start harvesting by pinching the stalk just above a new pair of leaves. This will prompt the plant to produce more stems from axils of those leaves you’ve left behind, giving your pot more longevity.
x Laetitia
This recipe was first published in my book Sweet Peas for Summer