Rooting Basil in a Glass of Water

The cold finally arrived properly last night — I could tell before I opened the shutters, because the house had that particular stillness that only settles in when the heating has been off all night and the air has given up trying. So the morning’s small job announced itself: the windowsill pots could no longer pretend it was still September. The rosemary had gone woody and cramped in its pot, the basil was all stem and a few tired top leaves, and the mint had sent runners clear off the edge of the sill, which I somehow hadn’t noticed until I lifted it.

I moved the rosemary up into the next size pot with fresh soil and a handful of grit at the bottom, cut the basil back hard, and stood the trimmings in a glass of water on the sill where I can keep an eye on them — they’ll root in a fortnight and then I’ll have more basil than any reasonable person needs, which is a problem I’m glad to have. Then I turned every pot a quarter turn toward the window, because they all lean, and they all lean the same way, and by the end of the week a plant will have grown itself crooked chasing a light that never moved.

While I had soil under my nails I remembered the thing that actually keeps potted herbs alive through a cold spell, and it isn’t watering them more: water them from the bottom. Stand the pot in a bowl of water for twenty minutes and let it drink up through the hole, then lift it out and let it drain properly. Roots chase moisture downward, so a plant watered from below grows roots that can go looking for water on their own, while a plant watered from above every morning grows roots that just wait near the surface. The rosemary, being Mediterranean and stubborn, would rather be dry than fussed over — I’ve killed more of them with kindness than with neglect, which is a sentence that probably applies to a few other things around here.

The kitchen smells of damp soil, which is one of the honest smells, and the glass of basil cuttings is catching the last of the light. The sill looks different now — greener at one end, bare at the other. If even half of those cuttings take, I’ll be giving basil away to the whole lane by November.