Growing basil: there’s plenty of choice!

The light this morning made me stop and admire the colours of the basil. It was a bright morning after rain, and the basil is just coming into its own after surviving the dry weather.

holy basil and dark opal basil
Holy and dark opal basil look great together.

In particular the Dark Opal showed up nicely against the Holy basil.

Basil has to be one of the favourite herbs to grow for the home gardener, with good reason. First of all, fresh picked basil from the garden is so much better than bought basil. Either you buy a bunch that has been battered around and has those black bruises on the leaves, or you get a live plant that is anaemic and insipid. Much better to pick leaves that are packed with flavour from full sunlight.

But another reason to grow your own is that you have the luxury of several types to pick. There is a huge difference in flavours and aromas, and it’s great to have the right basil for your meal.

Growing basil

I sowed five types this spring, along with the standard basil which self seeds all over the garden. In the main photo the rows are, from the front, Dark Opal, Holy, Clove (hard to see, only two survived), Lemon, and Thai. I got the seed from one of our local seed companies.

Basil germinates very readily, so you don’t need many seeds to get a good row. In our climate, we can either sow into seed trays in late Winter or early Spring and nurture the seedlings though our dry Spring, or sow direct in late Spring when the rain has returned. The plants naturally germinate from last year’s seed in the late Spring.

If you are impatient to get started or live in a cool climate, planting out a pot from the supermarket is a good and cheap way to quickly get a plant to pick, and they usually adapt straight away to full sun.

With our mild climate, basil tends to grow well into Winter, which means there’s not so much urgency to get the new season going. Some tough ones like the lemon basil grow through the year, so there’s always some to pick of one sort or another.

Varieties

It’s worth going through a seed catalogue and getting a few that sound interesting. The different types have different growth habits as well as flavours. Lemon, Thai and Holy Basil all have fairly small and flat leaves compared with the puffy standard type. They all tend to flower early, and you can promote leaf growth by nipping out the flower heads as they form, which also tends to give a rounded plant. With the hot dry weather we have had, my lemon basil in particular went straight to flower, almost from seedling size, but now it’s putting more foliage on. I will cut all the seed heads off that when I’ve got a little time for a fiddly job.

The Opal basil by contrast stayed very leafy. It has the standard fragrance, and has been most useful for cooking so far. It’s also good for salads of course. Holy and Thai basils have similar fragrances, very strong and good for dropping into hot dishes before serving. I need to get some Thai and Vietnamese dishes cooking to make the most of mine. They make me think of Pho, with the basil dropped into the bowl at the table.

The lemon basil is new to me, and really nice, good for fish with a clear lemon fragrance.

As for the Clove basil, I suppose it will be good for curries as the flavour really is spicy. It seems to be the tallest of them, so should give us plenty of leaves to try.

As all the basils seem to be such an easy herb to grow here, and look good in a mixed bed, I’m sure a good range of basils will be a permanent feature of the garden.