Re-growing my Perennial Basil

When we were in a house with a garden, we had so much perennial basil that I could harvest sheaves of it, long luscious stalks with abundant flowers and juicy leaves. The bees loved them so much that when we harvested in the morning they would get quite angry and when I cut it back, they would be buzzing around my head as if to say: "Stop! You're taking away our best food!"

Since we moved to an apartment I've had to make do with this one, a great, great, great grandchild of my original plant.

And now that it's getting so woody, I've taken a cutting and am (hopefully!) going to start a new generation.

So I selected a nice healthy looking new shoot and snipped it off with a pair of sharp scissors.

Then I stripped some leaves off for the pesto my partner Elinor is going to make and added it to my "swamp vase" where I'm re-shooting some bamboo and a fennel stem.

Basil shoots quite easily in water as long as it's in a sunny spot and I've added some seaweed fertiliser to get it going. It should take about a month or so and then it will be planted in a pot with rich soil

Here's the sequence...