In this three-part video series titled ‘The Apartment Gardener’, learn how to grow your own produce in the comfort of your own home.
Herbs provide a variety of bold flavours to jazz up your home cooking. Growing your own herbs at home is inexpensive and relatively simple – and a way to ensure you always have access to fresh, organic herbs.
Follow these instructions to learn how to propagate sweet basil without growing them from scratch!
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Here's what you'll need:
- A planter box of your desired size and shape
- A basil plant
- Potting mix
- A glass jar or vase
- Water
- Decorative items to spruce up your planter box
Follow these steps to start planting sweet basil:
- Obtain a planter box of your desired size. You can easily find one at any nursery, or be creative and build your own out of recycled materials.
- Ready to start planting? Here comes the fun part: choosing the type of plants that will grow in your planter box. The sky’s the limit when it comes to choosing plants – but we have chosen sweet basil to start with as it thrives in hot climates like ours.
- Take a 10cm basil cutting from the growing tip, right below a leaf node.
- Remove the lower leaves from the cut end.
- Place the cutting in a glass of water.
- Let the roots grow till they are about 3cm long. Remember to change the water in the glass jar every few days, or whenever the water turns cloudy.
- When the roots are fully grown, your basil cutting is ready to be transferred into the planter box.
- Place the basil cutting in the planter box which has been filled with potting mix.
- Place the planter box in a place which received diffused sunlight. We recommend placing it near the window in your living room.
- Keep the potting mix moist, but not wet.
- Once your basil plants have grown, you can grow even more simply by propagating more basil from cuttings. Repeat from steps 3 onwards!
Are you inspired to grow some fresh basil of your own? Give it a shot and show off your harvest on Facebook or Instagram. We’d love to admire it.
Check out the other Apartment Gardener Series on growing microgreens or leafy greens.