I live in Italy, and everyone knows how much Italians love their basil.
Even in the families with the worse black thumb imaginable, there is at least one pot of basil sitting on a balcony or windowsill. It gets thrown on top of plates of steaming spaghetti, made into pesto (check out my foolproof recipe and 15 ways and recipes to use basil pesto!), or placed prettily atop Neapolitan pizza. (My adoptive city, Naples, is the birthplace of pizza!)
I used to buy a few new basil plants every year, as most people do, and these would do me very well for the whole basil season, until winter. Then my sister-in-law taught me a trick, and I haven’t bought a basil plant since.
She taught me how to harvest basil seeds from the plant as it dies off and dries up.
I’m sort of kicking myself that this never occurred to me before she showed me, because it seems so obvious, but apparently it isn’t just me because most people I know don’t do this. But it is so easy and totally free. Ok, I know that basil plants aren’t exactly expensive, but you also get a whole lot more satisfaction from growing massive basil plants from seeds that you harvested yourself than from little plants you bought somewhere. Compare the following:
visitor to home: Wow, your basil plants are huge!
you: Thanks, I bought the plants at Acme plant nursery.
visitor: Yeah, that’s nice…
OR
visitor to home: Wow, your basil plants are huge!
you: Thanks, I grew them from the seeds I collected last year. These are the great, great grandchildren of basil plants that I had years ago!
visitor: Get out! That’s so cool!
As you can see, the coolness factor goes way up this way!
So, are you ready to learn how to grow basil year after year without spending a cent, raising generation after generation of fragrant and tasty green leaves? Let me show you how!
