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> A fresh batch of basil at the grocery store is essentially a luxury item, exclusive to those who can afford it I grow a fair amount my food on my allotment,

• jxcl 3y ago
  What is the size of your basil bed? 50 kg of basil per season seems wonderful!
  • cameronh90 3y ago
    I think it's about 4 metres by 2 metres. I plant quite densely compared to what you'll normally see recommended on the back of a seed packet, and to save on space between rows, I built a wooden frame that I can use to walk over and harvest from the top. Probably not very safe, but luckily I don't have to report to the HSE! I also start them off indoors and plant out early since London has a rather mild climate. Also: it smells bloody amazing.
    • thefcpk 3y ago
      but what do you do with 50kg of basil... I love pesto and it's a great addon to many things, but I don't see myself using more than a couple hundred g per week.
      • cameronh90 3y ago
        Once you have an abundance of it, you can really just put it in everything. Anything with tomato is better with basil, plus any sandwiches, salads, pizzas, pasta dishes. I have rabbits, so they get through a lot of fresh herbs (especially the stems) and give me fertilizer back in the form of... little round spheres. Besides that, I preserve it by making it into pesto, chutneys and other basil-based sauces, oils, jars of dried flakes and freezing it. Anything I have left over, I give away to friends and family.
        • ilyt 3y ago
          pre-seasoning your rabbit I see...
• Cerium 3y ago
  I always grow basil. About 4 square feet is enough to have pesto sauce once a week.
  • cameronh90 3y ago
    I make a lot of pesto also and freeze it to use it throughout the winter. Garlic is one of my favourite crops. It's not as cost beneficial to grow as basil, but being able to pick the cultivar is amazing. It's unfortunate that pine nuts are so expensive. We base most of our pesto on other nuts to save money, but you just can't beat the taste of a pine nut pesto IMO.
    • Cerium 3y ago
      In my opinion cashews are acceptable, but pine nuts definitely the best. I make a vegan pesto using the following ingredients: basil, pine nuts, garlic, miso, olive oil. The miso adds the fermented and creamy flavor of the parmesan. Remove stems from basil, wash and tap to dry, don't spin (a little water is good). Add ingredients to the food processor and blend until desired consistency. Scrape down sides and add oil as needed.
      • futevolei 3y ago
        Walnuts are where it’s at (but agreed pine nuts are clearly the winner). Homemade pesto with homegrown basil was a revelation in our house. Better than any store bought and a fraction of the price.
• jamal-kumar 3y ago
  I was taught by a couple of friends from Italy about how to harvest the seeds and re-grow them, very easy to do. Probably my favorite plant to cultivate now considering how simple it is to grow it, it's always nicer to have fresh herbs than store-bought (often going bad) or dry (no flavour). There is a key time to harvest but I think it depends on the climate you're in so I can't really advise on that unless you live in köppen zone AF. Mint is about the same and I think even more easy. One of the things about herbs is that alot of them are great chelating agents for soil. It's something to be aware of because if for example your soil is rich in arsenic, cadmium or lead, you can remediate some of it out with oregano or thyme but since these things absorb enough of that to become a potential hazard to health it's actually fairly prudent to grow your own as consumer reports has pointed out that all brands they have tested in stores have this crap in them [1], especially if you're gardening in an urban setting [2] [1] https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herbs-and-spices-might-contain-arsenic-cadmium-and-lead-a6246621494/ https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herb... [2] https://clf.jhsph.edu/sites/default/files/2019-03/suh-soil-testing-guide-2019.pdf https://clf.jhsph.edu/sites/default/files/2019-03/suh-soil-t...
  • civilitty 3y ago
    If you're growing the herbs in planters, it pays to use a custom potting mix that is 1 part peat moss, 1 part compost, and 1 part vermiculite. It eliminates most risk of heavy metals and provides a very light and fluffy medium with lots of aeration and water retention.
    • pixl97 3y ago
      Honestly the water retention alone is more than worth the soil costs with the potting mix. Many herbs can be very sensitive to water/heat and good control here allows the plants to grow much larger and more resilient.
      • jamal-kumar 3y ago
        So I haven't been keeping on top of this so please correct me if I'm wrong anywhere, but what I've seen to get around this in some experimental hydroponic designs is using piezoelectric ultrasound emitters to make a fog that plant roots hang into, keeping them at a certain level of humidity. The issue I recall they encountered was that the roots ended up making these dendrites that kind of went nowhere and it inhibited growth. I wonder if they've come up with some kind of hybrid method at this point which solves any of these problems because that sounds like a pretty good use case for that kind of technology if water retention is important. I think I saw something like this at a ritz grocery store in California growing basil somewhere but it didn't really look like it was making the best basil I've ever seen or anything, and I didn't really look that hard to see how it worked but it did look a little foggy in there.
• mlinhares 3y ago
  The reality is that farming only works in medium to large scale, people that try to grow food for themselves do it either because they have no other option and will die otherwise or they have too much money and time in their hands. My grandpa was a medium scale farmer for most of his life and when he retired he kept a couple dozen cows for milk and he paid every single month to keep it going. It was his hobby and he knew that, he said he'd need a couple hundred again to make it at least pay for itself. It's one of the reasons I LOL hard whenever I hear tech people saying they will "retire and become farmers", these people have no idea what it is like to work on a farm for real. Farm to Taber is a great listen on farming in general, eye opening for those that have had little to no contact to real world farming: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/farm-to-taber/id1669584141 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/farm-to-taber/id166958...
  • kozikow 3y ago
    Tech saying "I'll become farmer" to escape tech is very amusing, especially how data-driven the large scale farming is, and how small scale farming is getting priced out by large scale farming. I'm not a farmer, but I did some tech for farming and you would be surprised how tech driven it is. Agriculture was probably the first industry that used satellite imagery outside of military on the large scale. If someone is Silicon Valley web app developer and went farming, they actually could be going deeper into tech than escape it.
    • awavering 3y ago
      I think most people expressing this sentiment are referring to small scale homesteads or hobby farms, which I have found to be a great break from desk time.
    • ilyt 3y ago
      Yeah I have feeling most of that is "I will live off my savings and have a hobby", rather than actually trying to live off that.
  • o0banky0o 3y ago
    It sounds like tech folks want to do like your grandpa wanted, even though they're paying to sustain it
• swader999 3y ago
  I think this is a smart way to go. I'll grow my own things for better taste too.
• crazygringo 3y ago
  I tried growing basil in my windowsill. The problem was that I don't use basil at a constant rate; I use it in big bursts or not at all. Which just doesn't work. I needed to use a bunch of basil, and it was either cut off all the leaves or buy it at the store. So I cut off all the leaves and that was the end of it...
  • ska 3y ago
    The "big burst" problem is usually solved by a few (say 4) plants, not one. But another thing about growing anything is that it works better if you work around it's schedule rather than the other way around. Hothousing and international shipping have got us out of the habit of thinking seasonally or by growth cycle of a plant, but it's not hard to adapt to.
    • asdff 3y ago
      Also for a lot of our food stuffs, they exist specifically to deal with an excess you can't deal with at the time of harvest. Things like tomato sauce, various jams, etc. All of that is designed to take a bounty of a crop, and turn it into a form you can eat in the middle of winter when everything is dead outside. Today though, we think nothing of the implications of this as we buy a jar of ragu once a week.
  • pcthrowaway 3y ago
    Add 2 more basil plants and prune 1/3 the leaves when you use it. Pruning the basil will also cause it to grow bigger and better
  • asdff 3y ago
    Easy. Grow more basil. Eat more basil regularly. Make pesto with excess basil. Freeze basil. Life gave you lemons, so make lemonade.
• orbit7 3y ago
  I keep thinking about doing this, do you have any good sources of info you have followed or do you write about it anywhere?
  • cameronh90 3y ago
    Honestly it's one of those things you just have to try and figure out a bit through trial and error, especially as a lot can depend on your local climate, soil type, etc. If you have any local gardening or allotment groups, the wisdom of the elders can be invaluable, but sometimes you have to go your own way to find out what works for you. My advice would always be start small with easy things like herbs, then work your way up. Besides that, there are a lot of great resources on YouTube. Personally, I mostly watch the British videos because - bluntly - Americans are very wealthy and always have loads of land, power tools, cheap resources, pick up trucks, backhoes, etc. and I don't have any of that. They also seem to be a lot more serious about it, with homesteading or even borderline industrial setups. The British videos tend to be much more about bodging things on a budget in a small back garden for fun, which is much closer to what I'm doing! Also I don't have to worry about climactic differences that way. With that being said, some of my favourite channels are alexgrowsfood, GrowVeg, Charles Dowding, homegrown.garden, My Family Garden, Down to Earth with Jim, Castle Hill Garden, and of course, BBC Gardeners World. I also love (and am a member of) the Royal Horticultural Society.
• gs17 3y ago
  I noticed the same thing, a few stores have basil plants for sale at prices which always confuse me. Buying a $6 plant (not sure what Trader Joe's has them for these days), even if I was immediately stripping all the leaves off it is sometimes a better deal by itself.
• mywittyname 3y ago
  I've noticed this as well. I really think there's a market for a grocery store "herb bar." A self-service bed where herbs grow and customers just take what they want. I would think this could greatly lower the expense of selling fresh herbs, since it's probably a easy thing to set and forget with a little automation. I maintain my own herb garden. $10 of plants and some regular watering keeps me very well stocked with everything I need from spring until fall. I haven't refreshed the soil in five years and everything still grows to fill the entire pot by summer.
  • ilyt 3y ago
    People would fuck the plants over within a day. It would at least have someone at the site doing the cutting.
  • asdff 3y ago
    Most grocery stores do have a small set of cuttings of fresh herbs these days it seems.
• callalex 3y ago
  The subsidy/grant/handout system for food production and distribution is very nuanced and piecemeal so the individual price of foods ends up seemingly random.
• asdff 3y ago
  The best thing about this sort of farming is you get ready access to heirlooms basically whenever you want thanks to how many indeterminate varietals there are these days (if you have greenhouse or no frost in your climate zone you can have a fruit bearing tomato plant at pretty much all times). Occasionally I can get an heirloom in the grocery store but its a toss up what exactly it will be or if its even available at the time. Meanwhile I can pick out of the catalog some very bizarre looking tomatoes or other plants, grow them up before long, and in a few square feet end up with more of these heirloom tomatoes (that might be sold for like $5 a pound normally) than I could ever know what to do with. I can also grow various different herbs that are normally tricky to source, e.g. thai basil that can't be found outside asian grocery stores. Plenty of these heirlooms would be impossible to get other than growing them yourself because they have characteristics that make commercial sale a nonstarter: e.g. my heirloom tomatoes basically cannot be stacked up and sold in a market stand because they are sometimes larger than grapefruits, aren't very sturdy like perhaps a roma tomato is, and will crush themselves.