You wouldn't download 16 basil plants
So, you know those spindly basil plants you can get in the supermarket that are all leggy and pale, and you put them on the window-ledge and pick a few leaves from them and then they die?
turning it into a healthy plant and
making an army of clones from it so that all your friends can have one too
scissors for cutting the stalks
enough pots for however many seedlings you want to make
Have a look at your parent plant. You'll see that each bundle of leaves comes out from a knobbly bit in the stem. That knobbly bit is called a leaf node.
Gently take hold of the very top set of leaves and count the leaf nodes on that particular stalk, counting down from the top.
If there are more than three nodes, cut the stalk just below the second leaf node.
The bit that you have just cut off is called a cutting, and it will become a new plant. To do this, we have to get it to grow roots.
Take your cutting and remove all the leaves except the four at the very top.
Fill your bottle with water and insert the cutting into the top of the bottle, with the stem completely submerged in water, and the leaves outside in the air.
Now repeat until you've taken about six cuttings, or you've taken all the cuttings available. Put them all in water-filled bottles. (I use milk bottles which hold about four stems at once with enough space for their leaves to get the sunlight, but if you're using wine bottles it might be fewer.)
Put the cuttings/bottles onto a sunny window-ledge and wait. Within about a week you should see roots beginning to grow. Keep the water topped up to the top, and let the roots grow until they are two or three inches long.
When the roots are 2-3 inches long, fill your pots with compost and water them well. Shove your fingers in the wet compost to make a space for the cutting's new roots and gently insert the cutting into the hole. Put a little bit more compost on top and firm it down, move on to plant the next one.
Providing all your cuttings get over the shock of transfer (and they probably will) you will then have 8 little basil plants like the smallest ones in my picture.
Put them back on the sunny window-ledge to let them get established and begin to grow. Congrats, you now have 8 basil plants plus the parent plant.
When you're taking the cuttings, you must leave at least one leaf node on every stalk. The plant can't create leaves without the nodes, and if it has no leaves it's basically going to die.
You want the plant to create new leaves and thicken up. If a stalk doesn't have more than two nodes, don't make cuttings from that stalk at all. Leave that stalk to grow.
Taking your cuttings will stimulate the plant to grow, and lower nodes which may not have had leaves on them when you got the plant, will now begin to produce them. This will make the plant bushier and stronger, but it will need a bit of extra food to help it put the extra effort in. So give it a new layer of compost on the top, water it, and put it back on the sunny window-ledge as well.
Let your first generation of cuttings grow undisturbed for a few weeks. (Water only when the soil feels dry.)
When they start looking long and thin, you want to encourage them to create side-shoots and begin bushing out. You don't want a long thin plant. It will fall over in the wind.
Look at the very top of the plant where you will see two tiny baby leaves developing. If you let them develop, the plant will continue to grow long and thin, but if you take them out it will encourage the side shoots to grow. Pinch out the tiny baby leaves right at the top of the cuttings, and very soon you'll see they start to grow outwards instead of upwards.
After a few weeks your cuttings will look like the larger plants in my picture, and your parent plant will have grown enough to have added extra nodes. Which means that you can now take another batch of cuttings and start the process all over again.
You can pretty much keep this going all summer if you want.
Give plants away, eat fresh basil all summer and fill your freezer with bags of basil leaves for the winter :) Happy cloning!
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