Growing basil indoors.

It's easy to grow basil indoors.

I've grown basil (Ocimum basilicum) indoors, no problem. All you need is a south-facing window (well, perhaps not in Florida...) and daily watering.

I'd had trouble germinating other Lamiaceae (like lavender and rosemary), so I thought that only 1 in 100 basil seeds would germinate, too. So I sprinkled one pot with all the seeds in a seed packet.

And they all sprouted.

That gave me a forest of 50 or so tiny basils. Culling them as they grew (using the culls in the kitchen of course), I ended up with 3 very large plants. It said on the seed packed, "max 50 cm tall" (about 1 ½—), but these went over a meter. Could be the fertilizer, could be the sunny south-facing window. That was normal "genovese" basil, the simple, large-leaf, light green stuff.

Basils are short-lived perennials if you snip the flowerstalks as they appear. They did get ratty-looking in winter, with insect damage and such, but after a severe cut in spring and a change of dirt they grew back, lush and big, when the light came back in spring.

They did need daily watering, even though they were in a 10-liter (2.5 gallon) bucket at the end.

These three basil plants produced a lot of leaf, partly because I kept snipping them, partly because they were basils. They produced so much that I grew tired of basil at one point (it started to taste of soap, to me) and cut them down. Drying the leaf off those plants gave me 3 liters basil leaf... they were simply huge.