How to grow basil

The perfect flavour partner for homegrown tomatoes, sweet or genovese basil is wonderfully fragrant with an aniseed flavour that combines both sweet and spicy. It’s delicious in salads, with pasta and white cheeses and essential for making pesto.

Basil likes a warm, sunny to partially shaded position in garden beds or pots. In the vegie patch, plant it around tomatoes. Indoors, basil can grow successfully in small pots kept in good natural light, such as a sunny, north-facing windowsill. It’s a warm-season annual, so once winter arrives, basil disappears.

How to grow

Soil: Quick and easy to grow, basil likes fertile, well-drained, enriched soil, so add compost or aged manure in both gardens and pots. It comes up within 10 days from seed and you can sow it directly into the garden or into pots.
Speed: The best basil is from young, fast-growing plants. To maintain a supply, sow a new batch of seeds every month, pulling out the earlier batch when the latest is ready to pick. Grow as individual plants spaced 30cm apart, or thickly massed in rows or pots for picking young. Water regularly at the base of the plant, and liquid feed every three to four weeks.

Harvest: It’s a bushy herb, reaching 30–45cm high. Large, soft leaves are ready to harvest as soon as they’re big enough. Pinching out the tips of shoots regularly encourages dense, bushy growth, while early picking extends life by delaying flowering. Once flowers start to form, the plant is best replaced.

Your Garden Tip:
Basil is an annual herb, flowering in summer and autumn, producing lots of seed, then eventually dying away.
Basil often come up the following spring from their own seeds, but you can collect seed to store and sow next spring.