How To Save A Basil Plant (With Time Lapse)

Summary

In this insightful video by Gardening at 58 North, you can learn how to restore a sickly basil plant to full health. The video presents guidance on diagnosing common issues such as nutrient depletion, drought stress, and nitrogen deficiency. It emphasizes the importance of repotting, proper pruning, and adequate watering, alongside tips for lighting and temperature requirements. By following these steps, you can encourage lush growth and continuous harvests from your basil plant.

Highlights

• Spot nutrient depletion and stress in your basil for timely rescue! 🚨
• Learn the proper way to prune for promoting new growth and bushiness. ✂️
• Repotting to a bigger size pot is essential for a healthy root system. 🪴
• Ensure your basil's environment suits its tropical nature: warm and well-lit. 🌞
• Using the right compost mix can prevent water-logging and nutrient starvation. 🌱

Key Takeaways

• Revive your tired basil with the right care and watch it flourish! 🌱
• Proper pruning and repotting play vital roles in rescuing your basil. ✂️
• Ensure the basil gets plenty of light but shield it from harsh midday sun! ☀️
• Keep checking on its watering needs - don't let it dry out completely! 💧
• Upgrade its home to a bigger pot for happier roots and more growth. 🌿

Overview

The journey of rescuing a basil plant is as delicate as it is rewarding, and the video by Gardening at 58 North is a perfect guide for any gardening enthusiast. It addresses the common plight of the waning basil, showing how an initially lush plant could dwindle if left without proper feeding and care over time. Using a combination of informative explanations and practical demonstrations, the video provides viewers with actionable steps to breathe new life into their basil.

The process involves recognizing signs of distress like yellowing leaves from nutrient deficiency or shriveling due to inadequate watering. It highlights crucial interventions like pruning back the flowering shoots and repotting the plant into a larger space with rich compost to boost nutrient uptake. Light becomes another focal point, teaching that while basil loves sunbathing, midday sun should be avoided to prevent scorching its leaves.

Ultimately, the video's beauty lies in its time-lapse footage capturing the basil’s transformation post-revitalization. Over time, with adequate care, including adjustments to watering habits, nutrient provision, and ensuring warmth and light, the once-dying plant thrives with bushy, vibrant foliage, ready for plentiful harvests. This is an exciting journey for anyone wishing to not just save their basil but to also understand the nuances of plant childcare.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Overview The chapter introduces a video tutorial from 'Gardening at 58 North' focusing on revitalizing a sickly or dying basil plant. The speaker shares personal experience with a basil plant that sat on their kitchen windowsill for six months, highlighting a lack of feeding and minimal pruning as the cause of its decline. The aim is to guide viewers on restoring such plants to health for continuous harvest.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Understanding Basil Plant Issues The chapter discusses common issues faced by basil plants, particularly those bought from shops. Initially, these plants are short, bushy, and healthy. However, they suffer from nutrient depletion if left in their original small pots, as they quickly use up the nutrients and lack space for root growth. This can lead to stunted growth and energy loss because basil plants require ample nutrients and space to thrive.
• 01:30 - 02:30: Signs of Stress in Basil Plants The chapter discusses the signs of stress in basil plants, particularly focusing on drought stress. When basil plants are experiencing drought stress, their roots struggle to absorb water and nutrients due to limited space. This results in the plant being more susceptible to wilting. The transcript describes a basil plant with sustained drought stress, identifiable by wilted, curled, and pale leaves, indicating the need for more water and nutrients.
• 02:30 - 04:00: Pruning Techniques for Basil This chapter focuses on addressing various issues in basil cultivation, specifically related to its nutrient requirements and light exposure. It highlights the significance of ensuring adequate nitrogen levels to avoid yellowing and falling leaves, an indication of deficiency. Moreover, the basil discussed in the chapter has grown tall and straggly, reaching for light, suggesting insufficient light exposure. An additional concern noted is the basil starting to flower prematurely. The chapter details methods to remedy these problems, including improving fertilization, enlarging root space, and optimizing light conditions.
• 04:00 - 08:00: Repotting the Basil Plant This chapter discusses how to take care of a basil plant by pruning it to encourage healthy growth. The focus is on removing flowering stems as soon as they start to appear because the plant's energy then goes into flowering and seeding rather than leaf production. By pruning just above new shoots, the plant is encouraged to grow more leaves instead of flowers, maintaining its health and productivity.
• 08:00 - 12:00: Aftercare and Growth Tips This chapter discusses the proper techniques for pruning plants to encourage new growth. It emphasizes cutting the plant at a specific point to promote bushing and avoid leaving dead stem parts. The chapter also highlights the importance of feeding and repotting leggy plants to improve their health and growth. The main focus is on practical aftercare and growth tips to maintain a thriving plant.
• 12:00 - 15:00: Time-lapse and Final Results The chapter explains the process of pruning basil plants, especially when they have grown too tall and leggy. The narrator advises against cutting back hard, as this can prevent regrowth. The key is to prune selectively, removing dead parts and cutting back to where there are still healthy green leaves. This method ensures the plant can recover and continue to thrive.

How To Save A Basil Plant (With Time Lapse) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] hello and welcome to gardening at 58 North so in this video I'd like to show you how to restore a basil plant which is starting to look rather sickly or is even dying and how to bring it back into full health and so you can Harvest it again and again so this here is a good example of what a basil plant might look like after you've been sitting on your windowsill for about six months this one has been sitting on my windowsill in my kitchen for six months and all I've done is water it I haven't fed it I've only given it some minor pruning to take off a few leaves for cooking but otherwise
• 00:30 - 01:00 I've just kind of left it and this is pretty typical of what might happen to your basil plant so when you normally buy them from the shops they're normally a lot shorter normally around about this height here quite bushy and quite healthy looking the problem is they're at the sides where they're already using up all the nutrients inside the pot and if they were to stay in that small pot like this one has they use up that nutrients really quickly and then they just run out of energy for growing because they need lots of nutrients and feed to keep them going and also they don't have much space for their Roots
• 01:00 - 01:30 this has a couple of problems this makes it more difficult for them to absorb the nutrients even if it is there there's less space for the roots to absorb water so they're more drought stressed but also when you're watering them the water dries out very quickly from the pot because they can't store a lot of water so that's why you get a lot of drought stress now this is a plant with sustained drought stress you can see the leaves are looking rather wilted and curled up here that's a typical cyanos of a drought with stress plant you can see that they're all kind of curled up the leaves are looking very pale as well this is a sign that it needs more feed if it had
• 01:30 - 02:00 plenty of feed it'd be dark green leaves also the lower leaves have gone yellow and they're falling off and dying that's a sign of nitrogen deficiency so this basically needs more feed more space for its roots to grow and so that's what I'll be solving in this video also it could do with a bit more light you can see it's very tall straggly plant it's reaching for the light and another thing that shows you that it stresses it has all these flowering suits so when the basil plant starts to flower it picks up a green suit like this here but instead of leaves it has lots of little blue or purple flowers the problem with that is
• 02:00 - 02:30 it puts all its energy into flowering and then into seeds and it doesn't put any more energy into leave so you can see where it's flowered previously these stems have died back so the individual stems as soon as they start flowering you want to take those flowers off so I'll just go ahead now and start doing a bit of pruning and see you what you need to do to bring your plant into a healthier state so if it does start to flower like this one here you just take off any of these flowering stems and when it comes to the location of pruning you want to prune it so that you're cutting it just above where some new shoots will come out from so you want to
• 02:30 - 03:00 cut it off around about here just with a pair of scissors or six tears that way in between where the two leaves are where they join the stem it will actually grow out new stems and you'll have a bushier plant and it will grow nicely if you were to cut it off at this point this top bit of stem would actually die off and then you just have an unsightly dead bit of stem so that's when you want to cut it down right next to where it's going to have new growth so with your leggy plant the main thing you need to do is feed it and repot it and it should do much better so what I'm going to do here is a bit of pruning
• 03:00 - 03:30 before that once your plant gets too late like this it really needs to be pruned now unfortunately this very tall leggy growth if I was to cut this back hard it probably wouldn't regrow when you prune basil you want them to have at least some green leaves left so this long shoot for example if I cut this down to this level here there's nothing really green on this level so it would probably die off so I'll have to be a bit more selective with this shoe take off any dead cut back to where there's still some healthy green leaves and that's about as
• 03:30 - 04:00 hard as I can do with that with that stem there but what I'll also do with this is just gently remove any of these dead leaves that are completely dry if I leave them they're unsightly they block light from getting to the other stems but also they could have mold and mildew growing on them in the future so I need to remove any of those dead bits so let's go ahead now cut back into these leggy growths and remove any dead material and that will straight away make the plant look a lot healthier and this is the beginning of the process to bring your plant back to health
• 04:00 - 04:30 so you can see there the plant already looks a bit better without all that dead material on it and if I pan down you'll be able to see how much material I've taken off as I say it's quite important to try and get it a bit lower so it's bushier a less leggy plant but also at every point where you cut it it will encourage side branches to come out and
• 04:30 - 05:00 you'll get a much bushier healthier looking plant because of that so what I'll do now is I'll get rid of all this dead material and I'll get ready for repotting it into a larger pot so this plant is currently in a 12 and a half centimeter pot and I'll be upgrading it into a two liter pot now if you've got a small basil plant and one need to write might do okay or two liter pot is also decent and finally American view is a two liter pot is probably around about half a gallon so that's about the size you're wanting for Optimum growth you can probably get away with a one liter pot which is about a quarter of a gallon but two liter will just give you a bit
• 05:00 - 05:30 more roof space for the plant and it'll just be easier with watering the bigger the plant pot the longer it takes for the soil to dry out that way if you forget to water it one day it's not going to something Wilt and get stressed and it's important that you don't let the plant get stressed because that's when the flowers appear and as I said previously if it's flowering it's not producing healthy leaves now when it comes to all the cutting material that you've taken off with the pruning you should have a lot of kind of leafy material like this here what you can actually do is you can use this for cuttings to make new plants now that isn't going to be the highlight of this
• 05:30 - 06:00 video because I've got a whole long video all about how to propagate basil so if you want to watch that there'll be a link in the description or there'll also be a link in the I card in the top right of the screen so I'm now going to go ahead and repot this plant so I just need to carefully take it out of the pot try not to damage the roots too much we don't want to cause any additional stress this plant is already in quite a poor state of health take it out there as you can see it is very root bound the roots are also very unhealthy if you have healthy Roots they should be nice
• 06:00 - 06:30 white bright white Roots these are kind of a dull brown color so they're really unhealthy that's because this has been drought stressed a lot and it's run out of nutrients and it's just not really putting any new growth on if the roots are new they're normally white and healthy if they're old and they're not growing they're not absorbing much nutrients they're normally this kind of dull brown color and if they're dark brown and soft and they're rotten but these aren't rotting so it's not over watering it's underwatering that's the problem here now what you can do is if your plant is a bit healthier than mine you can actually separate your plants individually you can maybe make up the
• 06:30 - 07:00 10 plant pots with basil plants because you often get 10 or 20 individual basil plants in a small pot like this but as my plant is so stressed I think that stress of disturbing The Roots will actually kill it so I'm not going to be doing this in this video but that's something you can do if you get a new basil plant you can separate them into individual pots and they'll do better with that extra root space so when it comes to repotting it's important to think about soil so what I'm using here is actually a rich multi-purpose compost when it comes to compost you want something that holds plenty of moisture
• 07:00 - 07:30 because basil doesn't like to dry out and have very dry soil so you want a nice rich multi-purpose compost that's quite an easy compost to find if you can't get a rich multi-purpose compost you could just use some homemade compost or some really rich garden soil but any kind of Rich multi-purpose compost should be good for the job because it's got a lot of nutrients already added to it and it holds a lot of moisture the only thing you want to watch is that it doesn't become waterlogged so when you are repotting it make sure you've got holes in the bottom of your pot and make sure when you water it any water that
• 07:30 - 08:00 collects underneath the pot is then removed so it's just not sitting in water because if basil sits soaking wet it will rot off its roots but generally it likes to be damp it doesn't like to dry out completely so just make sure it's got good drainage but it's a good multi-purpose compost which will hold a lot of water as well so that it's always well watered so I'm just going to repot this now what I need to make sure is it's repotted around about the height it was in the pot previously if you go a little bit deeper it's not too much of an issue basil is quite good at putting out new Roots along its stems so don't
• 08:00 - 08:30 worry too much about that but ideally repot it around about the same level that it was previously in the pot so one way to take this is you just get your your plant and you just carefully put it into the pot and see how much lower it is and so what you want to do is just keep topping up the compost until it's about the right level so I can see there that's about the right level I want it just a bit lower than the edges the reason being if you
• 08:30 - 09:00 fill it up with compost right through the edges of the pot the problem is there's no space for the water when you're watering it if your bottom watering is not such a problem but if you're top watering and the compost is right to the surface it's hard to get enough water into the pot so I always like to have the compost layer just about a centimeter or so or half an inch below the rim of the pot so I'm just going to go ahead now and carefully put the compost in what I'll do is I'll just make sure that the the plant is upright and I'll hold the stems inwards so that they're not getting in the way of the
• 09:00 - 09:30 compost I'm just going to carefully scatter the compost around the plant now if your new pot is not much bigger than the old one it might be quite difficult to get the compost down to the edges there's a couple of ways you can deal with that you can either gently push it down with your finger or you can just give the pot and the plant a shake and the compost should distribute down and you just want to gently firm the compost down just so there's no air gaps
• 09:30 - 10:00 because if there's air gaps The Roots will dry out and they won't grow properly but you don't want to push the compost down really hard the reason being if you push the compost down very hard what will happen is you'll compress the air spaces so that the plant roots will actually suffocate they won't be able to grow as well and also if you've got very hard compost it's very difficult for the plant roots to grow through it and so the plant will struggle to grow you what you want is a nice loose compost but firm down enough they don't have any big air spaces or any large gaps so you can either gently
• 10:00 - 10:30 push down with your fingers or you can shake it and just gently tap the plant down and that's to do the job for you so now the plant is repotted what you want to do is give it a good watering from the top this will help the compost wash into the roots and any gaps that are in the compost should be filled in with the compost so give it a good soak from above let any excess drain out and then you just want to start watering normally so what you want to do is check the compost every day make sure that the compost never fully dries out but you don't want to water it it's soaking wet so just check check it with your fingers
• 10:30 - 11:00 every day if the top layer of compost is just starting to dry out then it's time to water if the top layer compost is still wet or quite damp then I would leave it a bit longer wait for it to dry out a bit more and then water it and as I said previously any water that comes out the bottom if it collects in a tray you need to empty that if it's still there after half an hour watering just so it's not waterlogged and now when it comes to aftercare once it's repotted you should find that if you use multi-purpose compost there's a lot of feed already added so you won't actually need to feed the plant for the first two months but if you've used garden soil or
• 11:00 - 11:30 if you've used something like 100 choir mix though it hasn't got any added nutrients you might want to then feed the plant and if it's been growing in this compost for over two months you'll also want to feed it so when it comes to feed a balanced feed would normally be fine but if you want to get extra lost growth and really big leaves and lots of leafy growth what you want is a feed that's slightly higher in nitrogen because High nitrogen levels produces lots of large leaves As Leaves mainly need nitrogen to grow so go for a high nitrogen feed if you can and when it comes to location this one previously
• 11:30 - 12:00 was in rather low light levels that's why it was stretching it was getting quite leggy if your plant is looking the same try and give it some more light it basil likes lots of sunshine the only thing to avoid is in the mid-summer or if you're in a hot country avoid the midday Sun the midday sun is normally too strong for it and it will suffer any afternoon or morning sun is good midday Sun try and avoid it otherwise it will get scorched but it does do best with some direct sunlight if it's winter time and you live somewhere with dark cloudy Winters you might actually need a grow
• 12:00 - 12:30 light to keep this going because basil really does need decent light levels and when it comes to temperature try and keep it above 20 degrees between 20 and 30 degrees is ideal somewhere around the high 20s Celsius is probably best they are a tropical plant they do like high temperatures if it's below 20 degrees or if your plant is on a windowsill and it's winter time there could be a cold draft coming in that will also stunt the plant so what I'll do now is I'll give this a good soak I'll put it in a location where there's good light levels I'll also set up my time-lapse camera and just show you how the plant recovers
• 12:30 - 13:00 what you should notice is the leaves pick up quite quickly once the plant's been watered as this is currently drought stressed the leaves will pick up but then it won't put on much growth for a while the reason being is it will be putting lots of root growth on also I cut off most of the growing points so it needs to grow new suits so that'll take a little while and then we should get some nice new growth coming through and as the new growth gets more and more there's more leaves for it to synthesize the growth should really rapidly expand and by the end of the time lapse this would be a nice lost looking plant with
• 13:00 - 13:30 lots of green leaves so it's now one month later and as you can see it's grown a huge amount as you saw from that video they start off a
• 13:30 - 14:00 little bit slow gets growing and then put on lots of lost New Growth I'll just rotate it now so you can see a bit better for more size as you can see lots of healthy leaves but you can now start harvesting for cooking and as I say if you want to start pruning it back you can watch my previous video about how to propagate it and how to make more plants that's all you really need to do you just need to repot the plant give it a bit of a prune make sure it's well watered well fed you'll then green up really nicely give you lots of lots of green growth and it should grow for you just fine for a year or two that's all
• 14:00 - 14:30 for this video hopefully you guys have found it quite useful if you have any further questions please leave a comment down below