Transplanting Basil Indoors

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Save the basil! If you want to have delicious fresh basil all winter long, it is time for transplanting basil indoors.

I love fresh basil. Once I figured out that fresh basil is completely different (and by different I mean tastes and smells much better) from the dried stuff there was no going back to the crumbly stuff in a bottle. I must have fresh basil in my kitchen year round.

I learned about transplanting basil indoors last year for the first time. I had some wins and losses. I hope my experience will help you have a big win with your basil.

I read up on the subject and found there were basically two ways for transplanting basil indoors (or dividing and replanting outdoors):

1. Dip cuttings in root powder and plant according to the bottle directions

2. Stick basil cuttings in a cup of water and hope they form roots, no root powder needed. (This seemed so unlikely, it made me chuckle when I read it.)

The first thing I did was uproot my entire basil plant, drop it into a big bucket and bring it into the kitchen.

Of course I didn’t use the entire plant for cuttings. I promise to show you what else I did with it next week. 🙂

I made cuttings, dipped them in root powder and planted them according to the directions on the bottle of root powder.

Sorry, I know this isn’t a great pic, but I’m not that good at any kind of selfie, including’ hand modeling’.

It was so cute when I finished planting the pot that I sat it on my dining room table and felt very satisfied and proud.

I also had a few cutting left over, so I stuck them in a ceramic mug, suspended with plastic wrap that had a hole in it to allow the stems to dangle in the water. This I placed in my laundry room which is as sunny as my dining area. It was not as cute and so I just placed ‘out of the way’.

Both sets of cuttings went a bit shocky, but recovered after a few days. Then after two weeks I could see a change taking place. The potted basil was failing. It was failing to thrive despite the sun, water and vocal encouragement I gave it. 🙁

The cuttings in the mug in the laundry room seemed to be doing fine, though I hadn’t detected any roots. Thinking that perhaps the ‘mugged’ basil was getting more sun, I moved the pot in by it. As you can see from the picture, it was beginning to lose leaves and go brown. And then in a few days it just died. Oh crumb.

However, the cuttings in the mug, got roots and I transferred the whole thing to a prettier vase and took it into my kitchen windowsill. Now once it got roots I could have planted it in a pot, but it seemed happy enough and I had a supply of fresh basil all winter. Yay!

So my suggestion for transplanting basil indoors is obvious. Go with the cheap and implausible method.

Suspend the cuttings in a mug or vase and change out the water twice a week and then when it has some good little roots either transfer to a pot with soil or a larger vase and keep it in a warm, sunny place. Enjoy! –Laura

Oh! And if you missed it, I created this little self-watering planter for a basil earlier this summer. Check out the post for the self-watering planter here.