Almost everyone loves Basil and it's a simple herb to grow for beginner gardeners and/or windowsill gardeners. However, it's important to prune basil correctly to keep your plant healthy, bushy, and growing strong well into summer.
Pruning is basically cutting, trimming, or removing parts of a plant to encourage it to grow bigger and stronger. When pruning basil (or harvesting it to eat) it's important to cut the plant in between the nodes, rather than ripping off one leaf at a time. The nodes are the parts of the stem where sets of leaves emerge. The reason it is important to cut the plant here, rather than taking off one or two leaves at a time from random spots, is to encourage bushiness. When you cut the Basil plant in between the nodes, it encourages two stems to grow outward from that spot. If you prune your basil early and often, your plant will grow to be very big and bushy and you will be able to harvest from it all summer long! Watch this video below to see this technique in action.
Harvest your Basil like this for beautiful plants all summer, pesto on!