thanks for visiting homesteaders freedom again today want to talk to you about basil it's wonderful to use fresh inside your spaghetti sauces or throw it on your pizzas or also to dehydrate it and use it as a dried herb for seasonings and other dishes basil is quite easy to grow and it's pretty much a set it and forget it type of a plant I've never had to come out here and fuss and muss much with the basil at all for some reason tomato hornworms cannot stand basil so if you inter plant basil with your tomatoes the hornworms tend to leave it alone I'd been planting basil next to my tomato plants for about two years two or three years now and I've never had a problem again with hornworms so those are just a few things that I'd like to share with you about this versatile basil plant so how do you care for your basil plant how do you trim it how do you collect the leaves for harvesting so that you're ensuring that you're not damaging the plants that you still can continue to grow more leaves and continue to have the plant flourish so I'm going to show you those two things in one minute so once your basil gets to the point where you're starting to see all these flowers here if you want your plant to continue to grow you're going to want to go ahead and trim it down so the way you do that is just by removing the flowers off at the top and you can do that on each one of these and what will happen is that the leaves will start to grow back and they'll get bigger and then you'll have new flower stalks that come out on the top the second thing I want to show you is the proper way to thin your plant so you're going to harvest some of these leaves and take them in sizes you can dehydrate them and so that you can use them for food you want to do that in a way that it won't damage your plant and your plant can continue to grow so this is one of the best ways to do this you look down here you'll see that this top piece of the plant is what I want to take you never want to cut below this you always want to cut right above an area where you've got two leaves at least on either hand and you've got these little baby leaves that are coming out and those are going to branch out and grow more basil you can see how this one looks and now you see how this one looks it's down there and you can do that to quite a few parts of your bush and it will continue to grow back without much damage - well actually without any damage to the plane at all and that's pretty much how you go ahead and trim it then you can take these inside and you can dry them out by just letting them air dry or you can dry them out by putting them in a dehydrator thanks for watching this episode on basil hope you enjoyed it thanks for visiting homestead freedom