The Basil Harvest: What We Did With All That Basil
One very happy basil plant, two enthusiastic helpers, and a whole lot of leaves to figure out what to do with.
There comes a point every summer when I look at something in the garden and realize I may have let things get a little out of hand. This year, one of those things was the basil.
What started as a perfectly reasonable basil plant had turned into an absolute monster—in the best possible way. It was full, healthy, and producing far more basil than we could possibly use by grabbing a few leaves here and there for dinner.
It was time for a serious harvest.
And because apparently I enjoy turning a ten-minute garden chore into a full family event, I recruited two very enthusiastic helpers.
First, A Little About Growing Basil
Basil is one of those plants that makes you feel like you know what you’re doing in the garden. Give it plenty of warmth and sun, keep it watered, and once it gets going, it can really get going. Ours certainly did.
Basil is a warm-season herb that doesn’t tolerate frost, so I grow it during the hottest part of our garden season. It likes consistent moisture, but like most plants, it doesn’t want to sit in soggy soil. The thing that made the biggest difference for me, though, was learning that harvesting basil and taking care of the plant are basically the same job.
The More You Pick, the More It Grows
It feels a little wrong the first time you aggressively cut back a perfectly healthy basil plant, but basil actually benefits from regular harvesting.
Each time you cut a stem just above a pair of leaves, the plant can send out new growth from those leaf nodes. Instead of continuing upward on one long stem, it begins branching outward.
More branches mean more places for leaves to grow. Which is how a cute little basil plant eventually turns into… whatever was happening in my garden this year.
So, when you plant your basil seeds or transplants, give it plenty of space to grow if you truly want large basil harvests.
Don’t Wait Until You Need Basil
One mistake that’s easy to make is treating basil like parsley—walking outside, plucking off a few leaves when a recipe calls for them, and otherwise leaving the plant alone. You can do that, but if I want a full, bushy plant, I harvest whole stems regularly instead.
I also keep an eye out for flower buds. Once basil starts flowering, the plant begins shifting energy toward reproduction. I pinch the flowers back when I want to keep encouraging leaf production.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with letting some basil flower, either. The flowers are beautiful, pollinators love them, and eventually every garden season comes to an end.
When Is Basil Ready to Harvest?
You don’t need to wait for a basil plant to become the monster mine did (I harvested this particular plant previously — so this was not its first big haircut).
Once the plant is established and has several sets of leaves, you can begin taking small harvests. In fact, regular harvesting along the way is part of what encourages that bushier growth.
For a bigger harvest, I look for plenty of healthy growth and make sure I’m leaving enough of the plant behind to keep growing. Then I grab my clippers—or, apparently, assemble my tiny gardening crew—and start cutting.
Harvesting Basil With Kids
Before anybody was turned loose on the basil, we had a quick refresher on clipper safety. Tiny gardeners are very capable gardeners, but actual garden clippers require a few more rules than picking tomatoes. Once everyone understood the assignment, we got to work.
Well…
“Work” might be generous.
There was clipping. There was inspecting. There was plenty of discussion. There may have been some disagreement about which stems needed to be cut.
Efficiency: questionable.
Enthusiasm: 10/10.
Eventually, we ended up with a very large bowl of fresh basil. Could I have done it faster by myself? Absolutely. But faster isn’t always the point.
Then We Brought the Mess Inside
Harvesting was the easy part. Now I had a giant bowl of basil sitting in my kitchen.
This is one of those funny parts of growing food that I don’t think I fully appreciated until I started doing it myself. Growing something successfully is only half the equation.
Eventually you have to figure out what you’re going to do with all of it.
For this harvest, I knew exactly where most of ours was headed.
Basil salt and pesto.
Both let me take something that’s abundant in the garden right now and turn it into something we’ll actually use long after basil season is over. And that’s really the part of gardening I’ve grown to love most. Not just growing food for the sake of growing it—but finding ways to bring it into our kitchen, preserve it, cook with it, and make all that work in the garden useful.
What We Made
Part of this harvest became homemade basil salt, one of the easiest ways I’ve found to preserve that fresh basil flavor without requiring much work.
→ Read: How I Make Homemade Basil Salt
And a whole lot of it became homemade pesto, which I portion and freeze so we can pull out exactly what we need later.
→ Read: Homemade Basil Pesto + How I Freeze It
You can also watch the whole basil harvest—from our tiny garden crew to the kitchen chaos—in the video below.
The Part Worth Keeping
By the end of it, there was basil everywhere.
There were leaves on the counter, leaves on the floor, dishes in the sink, kids running through the kitchen, and significantly more cleanup than there would have been if I’d simply bought a jar of pesto. But we’ll also be eating pesto made from our garden months from now.
And my girls got to stand beside a basil plant that was almost as big as they were and help turn it into food. That’s worth a little mess.
Growing as we go.