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Hello, everybody. This is Kevin from Epic Gardening.
We're doing a video today on—𝐧𝐨𝐭 this whole system
which there will be videos on that—but just on this basil
here. So how do we prune this basil so it keeps growing
vegetation, which is what we want, and does not grow
any flowers? And not only that, how do we prune it in a
way that it does what we want so it grows very bushy
and very wide and keeps producing amazing leaves?
So it's actually really simple. First of all, this is two
types. This is actually two basil plants right there.
That's contributing to the bushiness, but I'm going to
zoom in right here. Just look at that. You see this cut
that I've made right there? That was one of the main
stems. And by cutting it I've removed all the growth
hormone out of the plant and it's basically redistributed
itself to this one right here, and the one on the left of it.
So you can see it sort of looks like a man with two hands
going upwards in the sky. And so now this one is one of
the main stems. And so if I wanted to do the same thing
what I would do is I would chop the main stem, or what
is considered the new main stem, potentially right there.
So you can see those two little hands or little nodes
coming out right there. If I chop the main stem, what
those will do is they will then become the bushier,
thicker stems and new vegetation will come out that
way. And you can see, if you think about it, what that's
going to do to the plant is it's going to keep making it a
bushier and bushier plant. So if I go in here—see where
my scissors are?—they're around that and I give that a
chop
What I've done here is I've pruned this in a way where
this right here and this right here will now grow outwards
like this and become bushier and continue to produce
vegetation instead of moving into their flowering phase.
And so you can imagine if you do this enough times and
you do this in a smart enough way, you're going to get a
basil plant that first of all never starts flowering because
flowers are never allowed to develop on the plant, so the
basil thinks Oh, I need to keep putting out vegetation
and as long as you have the right light conditions and
you have the right nutrition, water, oxygenation, you're
going to have basil basically forever. Obviously it can
get to a point where it's a little hard to handle but you
know that point comes at a much later date than most
people think. So let's look at what we cut off. So this was
going to, as you can see, create a lot more vegetation
and goes pretty much straight upwards, but it's a bit
early in this plant's life. I want to get as much basil as I
possibly can off of this so obviously I can use this basil
in the garden [by rooting and planting] or in the kitchen
but what I want to do is go through, locate those things
that I want to prune. So you can see what we've done is
we've got this one, we follow this one up, and then we
cut right there. And so I can actually do that on this one,
too. I won't do it in the video though, but I could cut right
about there.
So hopefully that was a helpful little primer on pruning
and exactly sort of how it works. I'm going to go through
and prune the rest of this and show you what happens.
All right, so I've gone ahead and thinned this plant out
considerably and it really doesn't even look like it. It's a
bit less tall, taken some of the top nodes off, and it's
just a bit more groomed. I mean I could probably even
take one of these off right here and shape it a little bit
more, but look: I've got a handful of basil. I mean at the
market you're talking about something like that is
probably like three, four bucks easy.
And it's just that easy. I know that a lot of people
watching this will say, Oh this is a suboptimal system,
you could have more basil in here, you could be using
this light better—all that's true. This is sort of a demo
system that I'm going to be doing for a couple of
reviews as well as for just showing how big one single
plant can get. So thanks for watching, guys. Please hit
Like, subscribe, comment, et cetera. If you want to see
more stuff like this, and of course and ask any
questions, I answer every single thing in the comments.
So thank you, keep growing, keep gardening.
Kevin from Epic Gardening, I'm out.
