How to Prune Basil So It Grows Forever!

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. And that's, 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, see where my scissors are. They're around that. I give that a chop. What I've done here is I've pruned this in a way where this right there 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's that 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 go 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 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 followed 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's a bit less tall. I've 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 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.