What's going on everyone Kevin from Epic Gardening here? Welcome back to the Epic

Gardening podcast. Today's question is, how do you germinate Basil? A lot of

people have a hard time with this seed because it's a bit of a slow grower.

I used to grow it a lot as micro-greens and it took a long time to grow to a harvestable stage compared to something like an

arugala or a radish or a sunflower or basically any other type of seed.

So it's a difficult seed to germinate if only for the fact that it's a bit unusual so one of the

interesting characteristics of basal seeds is that they are mucilaginous

meaning once you put water on them or once you moisten them with water they will form a gel around the seed

Kind of like Chia seeds if you've ever had Chia seeds Chia seeds will do the exact same thing.

And you can have these, there's Chia that I drink

in these kambucha drinks that the seed,

the gel around the seed actually provides this nice barrier

so that the drink looks like it's full of

chia seeds that are sort of just floating there but they're not floating because

it's the gel edges that are hitting each other and those are transparent so it

looks like they're floating.

Anyways, what I'm trying to say is that

Basel when you wet it, it forms its own sort of protective

moisturizing shell which can confuse people a lot because you might think that, oh, I need to water this

basal more to make sure it germinates, etc. No, not really with basal. Once you water it, that

mucilaginous shell that forms around it will keep it moist until it

germinates. So when it comes to germinating basil, you just need to make sure

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