Basil, parsley and mint will grow bigger and bushier all summer with a simple task done now. When you're growing herb plants, there's one tip you should follow this summer to ensure they grow bigger and bushier.
Why Grow Your Own Herbs?
When it comes to preparing a homemade meal, having your own herbs readily available can instantly elevate a dish. While fresh herbs are reasonably priced to purchase in most UK supermarkets, they can deteriorate rapidly and lose their flavour. Instead, potted herb plants are frequently a more economical and sustainable choice over time, and are also readily stocked in UK supermarkets. While they're typically sold as a single plant in one container, you can simply divide the plant and repot them as separate plants for enhanced growth, which will also help them survive considerably longer. They also serve as a low-maintenance complement to a vegetable patch or garden, and if you plant them now, they can be continually picked throughout the summer and incorporated into numerous fresh dishes, from salads to pasta meals and delicate tarts.
The Key to Fuller, More Abundant Herbs
But there's one practice you should be following to ensure your herbs keep growing fuller and more abundant so you can maximise their potential.
How to Grow Herbs Like Basil and Parsley at Home
One gardener has revealed what you should be doing with herb plants to yield even greater results and prevent them from becoming sparse and leggy in a video posted on TikTok, reports the Express. Lee Bestall, better known as @thenortherngardener, said there's one technique gardeners should understand when it comes to harvesting herbs this summer. Like any plant, herbs require pruning, but he cautioned gardeners against doing one particular thing.
"Here's the trick: don't just pick the tops. If you only ever snip the soft tips for cooking, you'll end up with leggy, straggly stems that look sad and taste worse," he said.
While the thrill of watching herbs begin to flower may put you off cutting them back, if left untended, the plant will simply start to go stalky and begin to flower, after which it loses all culinary worth. Instead, Lee urges gardeners to be "bold" when pruning their herb plants to prevent "stalky looking plants". Although you'll likely only require "those beautiful new tips" for cooking purposes, you should continue cutting the plant back to guarantee it keeps producing a plentiful harvest.
How to Prune Correctly
To achieve this correctly, Lee recommends "taking off what you need to use as herbs but also cutting back quite hard, almost to ground level" and ensuring this is done evenly so that plants can continue to regenerate. Repeating this "right through the summer" will stimulate fresh growth to return within just a few weeks, stopping plants from going woody and stalky, and ensuring herbs "taste good all season".
