Basil Fail? It's not your fault...
How to prolong the life of supermarket basil; growing herbs and a pine-mouth free recipe for Basil Pesto
Some years back, before Twitter became X and X became a cesspit, I did a video about supermarket basil that was the most ‘viral’ thing I ever did (apart from catching and perhaps spreading Covid) with nearly half a million views.. At the time I was pleased to be spreading the word about how to avoid killing basil AND building my social profile. Ultimately, the latter was a bit pointless because in the run up to the US election when Elon went batshit, I decided to abandon X and my 10,000 ‘followers’ for pastures new on Instagram. I won’t lie to you, I don’t love Instagram the way I loved Twitter with its lovely food and GIY community and it’s instant commentary on major world events… but I am persevering with Instagram for now, and anyway, I digress.
Consider this. You are doing your shopping and in the veg section and you spy a beautiful basil plant that is ALIVE- not a couple of snippets of basil in a plastic package, but an actual plant - fragrant, verdant, green, beautiful. Resolving to evolve as a human to the next level of greatness you bring it home full of hope and expectation, place it carefully on the kitchen windowsill and you are literally bursting with pride and happiness and evolutionary zeal. You’re basically the GOD OF GROWING THINGS. That evening, you make bruschetta and pop a fresh basil leaf on top of the tomatoes, and now you are the God of Plot-to-Plate dining as well.
Just the next day however the plant starts to look sickly. There’s a growing sense of dread - a dark shadow, a sleepless malice stirs in the deepest recess of your mind. The next day some leaves start to fall off the plant and you get a flashback to watching ET as a kid, and the rising panic as the chrysanthemum he gave to Elliot starts to die. And then, just 5 days after its triumphant trip home from the supermarket and for no reason that can be discerned by anyone, the plant simply dies right in front of your eyes. You feel embarrassed. What if the neighbours or friends see it? So, you put it in the brown bin and cover it with some carrot peelings. You feel guilt and self-loathing. That beautiful thing that was so alive and full of hope, is now DEAD. How is it possible for a person to be so lacking in green fingers that a basil plant that seemed perfectly content and healthy in the supermarket, died within days, seemingly for the reason of just being inside your home. Or is there something about your very presence, your aura, that sprinkles plants with death dust? You miserable, plant-destroying wretch.
Ah yes. If I had a euro for every person on a course or at a talk that said to me that they killed their supermarket basil, I’d be a wealthy man. Though this might seem like hyperbole, I worry that while GIY busts a lung trying to get people growing, supermarket basil is actually conspiring against us, giving millions of GIY-curious people a horrible plant-killing experience that puts them off growing forever.
This is a shame, because killing supermarket basil has nothing whatsoever to do with your green fingers or lack thereof. It is simply because in an effort to make the plant look beautiful and encourage you to put it in the basket, the nursery growing them for the supermarket cram in a load of basil plants in to ONE POT, often up to 30 of them. This means that the plants are competing for the very finite food that’s in the potting compost they are growing in - and eventually (often within days of getting them home), they simply run out of food and die. The irony is that when you see them in the supermarket, they are literally at their best - about to go over the edge in to a speedy death. Whether intentional or not (probably not), the retailers are condemning you to a basil FAIL by putting too many plants in one pot. As Pheobe sings in “Smelly Cat” - It’s Not Your Fault.
In the video below you can see what needs to be done when you get the basil plants home - and the clue to this whole darn enterprise is that we’re saying basil plants (plural) and not basil plant (singular). And not only will this approach prevent you from killing the basil, it is in fact, an ingenious cheat to a summer FULL of basil, rather than trying to grow basil from seed.
Remove the plants from the pot and carefully tease them apart, putting one basil plant in each 10cm pot of fresh (peat free) compost. Or you could put maybe 3-5 plants in a 30cm pot or a 30cm window box of potting compost. The point being that each little plant needs its own space and guarantee of soil food, best illustrated by the fact that if growing them in a soil in a polytunnel for example you space the plants 30cm apart from each other.
Once you get the basil potted up it should start to thrive within a few weeks, particularly if you follow a few further simple tips. Firstly, though basil likes heat, it doesn’t like it too steamy - so if you have it on your windowsill in the kitchen leave it beside a window that opens. Secondly, don’t water it too much - it’s a Mediterranean herb and so appreciates dry conditions. An occasional water, ideally from beneath by sitting it in a tray full of water, will be enough. And finally, there’s a very particular way to harvest your basil to get the most out of it - don’t pull leaves from here, there and everywhere. God damn it, that’s the approach of the old Basil Failing you. Instead, cut off the growing tip of the plant with a scissors, which encourages the plant to get bushy rather than tall and straggly. Keep harvesting by cutting off the tips above a node (where the leaves join the stem), so new shoots will grow out of the node.
In the pic below you can see i’ve three plants in a large pot (about 30cm) with the growing tips nipped out with a scissors and it is suitably BUSHY.
And that’s pretty much it - that one pot of supermarket basil and it’s 20 individual plants should provide more than enough basil to keep you happy right in to the autumn. The basil failing ends here.
Growing Herbs
I WAS IN a supermarket car park once and noticed that yards from where I parked my car there was a rosemary bush. I am sure that very few people (if any) knew it was there. The plant was about 3ft tall and equally as wide – completely abundant – just sitting there, unsung and unloved, churning out herbs, and crying out to be picked. There was enough rosemary on that plant to see us all in roast lamb dinners forever. Inside the supermarket, I found a herb retail display in the vegetable aisle and right there between the marjoram and sage was, yes you’ve guessed it – rosemary! €2 for a few miserly sprigs imported from Israel. Yep, sometimes the food chain hits you right between the eyes with a display of utter stupidity. I thought about standing there for a while so that I could tell anyone who came to buy herbs about the free rosemary out in the carpark. But I would probably have been carted away by the men in white coats.
Growing your own herbs is a great starting point on the GIY journey. Herbs tick so many boxes: they will save you lots of money from day one and since you simply pick as much as you need, there’s no waste (in our house, little cartons of herbs always ended up rotting in the back of the fridge, judging me silently each day as I went in for the milk). With homegrown herbs you get consistently high quality, fresh product, which can’t always be said about the shop-bought equivalent; and no packaging waste. Herbs are also generally easy to grow, relatively forgiving and low maintenance. You don’t need to have a garden to grow them since most of them will do perfectly fine in a pot or container on a windowsill. Best of all though, homegrown herbs will make your entire meal feel and taste homegrown, even if most of it isn’t.
Recipe of the Week - Basil & Walnut Pesto
Pine mouth would be funny if it wasn’t so bloody awful. It’s a malady you get from eating tainted pinenuts that results in a bitter, metallic taste in the mouth that can last for weeks. Every morsel of food you put in your mouth while afflicted tastes like metal. A deeply unpleasant bout of pine mouth about three years ago was enough to put me off pinenuts ever since.
So, here’s a pesto recipe that uses walnuts instead of pinenuts - you could also use hazelnuts. Making a big batch of pesto is a good way to use up and ‘store’ basil leaves. Pesto can be stored for a week in a tightly sealed jar or air-tight container, covered with a thin layer of olive oil. You can also freeze pesto, but omit the cheese and add it in when defrosting.
Ingredients
50g fresh basil leaves
2 large garlic cloves, roughly chopped
50g grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
50g walnuts
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
100ml extra virgin olive oil
Instructions
Place the walnuts and garlic in a food processor and blitz until coarsely chopped. Add the basil leaves, salt, and pepper and process until mixture resembles a paste, about 1 minute. With the processor running, slowly pour the olive oil in until the pesto is thoroughly blended. Add the Parmesan and process a minute more.
My favorite kind of garden accounts are tips with recipes.