How to “harden off” your basil and other house plants | Opinion

I love basil – it’s one of my favorite herbs. I eat it in salads and pesto, on pizza and sandwiches, and sometimes with a slice of fresh mozzarella cheese on a cracker covered with oil, balsamic vinegar, and with a little salt and pepper, or with some other Italian herbs.

This year I decided to grow my own and bought six plants from the garden center at the Walmart

five weeks ago. At first, they were blooming and I had plenty of new growth, but after about three weeks, I am now about down to just two surviving plants. I must have overwatered the other plants because they didn’t make it.

With the East Texas Arboretum’s bi-annual Plant Sale going on this past weekend, who better to ask about not killing your house plants than Jennifer Garcia, Ph.D., Executive Director for the Arboretum?

I suggested that maybe I should have transferred my plants to a bigger planter, but she countered that it all depends, and then posited that they may have just needed to be “hardened off.”

“If you had a basil plant that was growing in a beautiful greenhouse that was protect it from the sun and rain and all of these things, and then you take it home and put it right outside, then maybe the plants got too much sun, or maybe they didn’t get enough,” Garcia said. “You have to do what’s called, ‘hardening off.’”

“You gradually increase the amount of time the plant spends in the sun each day so they can get used to their new spot, kind of like a fish,” she said.