Basil has hit the big time. It's now America's favorite herb. Gardeners shopping for seeds and plants can find a wide variety, from the small-leaved lemon to luxuriant Italian ones such as Genovese.
Some have ruffled leaves, some smooth. The purple types are gorgeous, especially those with contrasting spikes of pale pink flowers, so they're often grown just for their looks. I've even seen some touted as "great as a cut flower," though in my experience basil tends to droop in the vase, so I stick with culinary use.
This spring I grew two seed flats of a purple basil named cinnamon. The intention was to raise the seedlings for the garden, but the weather at the time was too chilly to set out the plants, so they sat around in a sunny spot indoors, growing tall and lanky. I cut some stems for bouquets, with the usual dismal result. But I noticed that where I had cut them, just above the first set of leaves, they soon grew two new stems.
One day when I needed a fresh herb to perk up a salad, I picked some of the longest of these new shoots and added the leaves to my bowl. Those regrew as well. So I kept the flats around and got into the habit of using them. One day I placed whole leaves on crackers with cream cheese, capers and smoked salmon, and took them to a potluck, where they won raves.
Even though I now have healthy basil plants outdoors in the garden, I'm still snipping from my ridiculous-looking indoor supply. This is certainly the way I would grow herbs if I lived in a town apartment, and I might give it a try this winter, too, next to my sunniest window.
Many perennial herbs such as sage, rosemary and bay do all right indoors, but I often miss having such terminally frost-sensitive ones as basil at my fingertips, and the size of a typical pot doesn't give me the bounteous supply that those broad flats did.
My lucky basil accident was a bit like the practice of growing micro-greens, which entails sowing flats of potting mix thickly with various salad greens and other vegetables and then snipping them for flavoring and for garnishes when they are no more than 2 inches tall.
Our farm at one time brought such flats to chefs, with everything from pea vine tips to red baby beet leaves to watercress. One customer even set them at the end of his restaurant's bar, where they looked fresh and colorful as the salad cook snipped away.
Normally, micro-green plants are discarded after one cutting, but we found that if you put at least a 2-inch depth of growing mix in a flat, you could sometimes keep them going as a cut-and-come-again crop. To get regrowth, space the seeds an inch or so apart rather than thickly broadcasting them.
Johnny's Selected Seeds sells a wide selection of vegetable seeds specifically chosen for micro-green culture, and this year they've added a number of herbs, including cilantro, dill, fennel and basil.
Indoor basil cultivation may reduce the risk of your favorite herb getting a disease called downy mildew. A bright windowsill in an air-conditioned house could also allow you to raise cilantro, dill and fennel greens now.
Try basil first, but start snipping the tips of the stems early on to get plants that are shorter, bushier and look a little more housebroken than mine.
Damrosch is author of The Four Season Farm Gardener's Cookbook; her website is fourseasonfarm.com.
HomeStyle on 06/20/2015