For the Love of Basil

B, B, B, B, B . . . Bay, Bay, Bay, Bay, Bay . . . Baze, Baze, Baze, Baze, Baze . . . Bazl, Bazl, Bazl, Bazl, Bazl . . . BASIL!!! Folks, it's BASIL, BASIL, BASIL, BASIL, BASIL!

YES! BASIL is the NEW American Pastime. I found this out because I bought a clam shell of Basil, back when I was making that good zucchini soup. It was lovely, vivid green Basil, huge, beautiful leaves neatly stacked in the little plastic snap box. I used a few leaves right away, but then you know the story . . . it got buried in the fridge. It was forsaken and forgotten. Until I wanted to make zucchini soup again. So I dug out the little clam shell. Now, all of a sudden, the Basil was a purplish color sort of blending in with the original dark green color. You know how FRAGILE Basil is. It's so SENSITIVE. It punishes you for any physical contact, even the most delicate whisper of a touch, by turning pitch black on the spot. But really, I had left my Basil alone, abandoned, if you will. It was hibernating. I was confused because the leaves still looked perky, they weren't black and curling on the edges or anything. Yet they were definitely changing color. Green . . . purple green . . . purple. Then what's next?? Black, of course. And you know how well black-spotted leafy greens and I get along. Not very.

However, things changing to another color CAN happen and still be okay. Take DTD'S eyes. She was born in NC and she came with a set of VERY BIG, VERY BLUE, VERY, VERY BLUE eyes. She had these big BLUE eyes until age 5. That's when we moved to Florida. Then one day I woke up and DTD'S eyes had turned a pretty shade of medium green. Well, I'll be. I was worried at first. I was under the impression that a baby's blue eyes could, and very likely would, change colors, but a 5 year old's?!?!? Boy, what's wrong with her eyes?, I thought. Nothing, apparently. They've stayed green, they've stayed big, they've stayed perfectly useful, and people comment on those gorgeous green eyes (allow a poor mother to brag) all the time. Remember the clerk in the health food store wanting to photograph her eyes? I think that was in my very first blog :)) At any rate, DTD did not get her eyes from me. Mine are brown, small and ordinary. But I CAN see. I can see BETTER with glasses.

So, other things change color, too, like my green shirt's unfortunate meeting with Barkeeper's Friend. But I don't like the idea of food changing color. Do you? Unless a green pear turns yellow, something like that. But I don't care for an old casserole growing green mold, do you? I had mixed emotions about the Basil. It honestly didn't look scary or anything, but it certainly wasn't Green-green anymore. I'm sensing a recurring theme here, and it has to do with the color green.

So, when in doubt, GOOGLE! So, I Googled "Basil turning dark." Listen up, all this hogwash about Baseball being America's pastime, FORGET IT. Baseball is pulling the wool over our eyes. BIG TIME. Boy, we fell hard for that one. America REALLY has a fixation with BASIL, a TOTAL fascination. Really, get with the times. Baseball is a weary afterthought, a mere gnat on the sleeve, compared with Basil. If you don't believe me, in .21 seconds Google presented 1, 430,000 references for "Basil turning dark." Apparently I'm not as nutty as I thought. All of America is completely nuts. I'm just one little soul of 1.5 million people innocently asking, Why does my fresh Basil turn black?

So, I checked some of the websites, and if you need a good laugh, you should check them, too. We are so in love with Basil it isn't even funny. We have an insatiable curiosity about EVERYTHING Basil. We are eating, breathing and living Basil and we care about nothing else . . . NOTHING. I don't know how we have time to do anything else at all. There is even a Basil doc of sorts. She's an Expert with a capital E, a SCHOLAR, and she can tackle YOUR Basil problems. She welcomes THE MOST BIZARRE questions ever. You want an education?, she will gladly indulge you. She has a glorious dry wit, too.

Trust me, people pamper and fret over their beloved Basil plants. They buy them, plant them, nurture and coddle them, study them, fuss at them and then sorrowfully record their demise. They express undying devotion to their pets and contact the doc if things are not looking well. And trust me, things are not looking well. Basil can not only turn black, it can turn every color God ever created, red, yellow, brown, white, silver, gray, lime green and even bleached. It's leaves can roll (ha, there we go again with ROLL, visit yesterday's blog), curl, wilt, wrinkle, bubble, blister, bump, singe, crust, mat, concave, zigzag, fade, fall off and even "reduce to lace." It's stems can spindle-ize, swirl, deform, toughen, blacken (of course) and come up woody. It's roots can rot and wither. Basil can be home to bugs, worms of various colors including shiny black (of course), spiders, small flies, mites, caterpillars, slugs and animals. This wisp of an herb can come down with more diseases than we thought plantly possible, mold, mildew, fungus, bacteria, slime, scale, fuzz, even sunburn. Basil can sport colorful spots, dots, bumps, nodes, webs, circles, cotton threads, eggs, turds, splotches, sap, yellow sticky traps and yes, even dandruff. Powdery substances, too. There are virtually no limits to the predicaments Basil plants fall prey to, and consequently, so do you.

People worry if their Basil is going to make it. The good doc says, "Don't worry, maybe it's transplant shock." They want to know, "Why doesn't the plant seem to want to take off?" Or confess, "It is slowly sinking groundward." "My Basil is slender, not bushy," they scratch their soiled foreheads. They further declare, in disbelief, "The plant did fabulously for a couple of weeks." They exist in a state of dread and fear because they are murdering the prized Basil bush their granny brought from Italy a hundred years ago. They beg for remedies and dutifully apply the advice granted, the Doc rarely found stumped. Everything from garlic spray to insecticidal soap to consulting a psychic, it's all in a good day's work. Why do these methods fail?, they wail. They want to know how come their Basil tastes woody or pepperminty. Basil lovers everywhere master the art of pinching leaves and cajoling their babies back to health. People describe things in funny ways, too, like the leaves have "tiny little black (of course) spots and then I noticed larger spots about the size of a pinhead." Or mystery insects as "long grasshopper shaped bugs no larger than 1/4 inch long." In short, America's Basil "is washed out and wimping out on leaf production." Frantic gardeners everywhere sign their desperate, though grateful, emails to the Basil M.D.'s, Yours Sincerely. And I think it's safe to say that the joy is abundant when a Basil pet is revived to it's former fluffy self.

Okay, I saved the best for last. How 'bout this? "My plant is being attacked by something. Little black poppy seed like things (a cross between poppy seeds and toasted sesame seeds) are all over the leaves." Or, someone complains he has a "clear, sappy, sticky type water thing on some of the leaves." No problem, "the sap is excrement from the scale, it's called honeydew." Now that honeydew is a thing of my past. And my personal favorite, "Hundreds of thousands of tiny egg or bumpy things are exploding out from inside the stem." Pinch, the Doc, I guess, "wishes she could have seen that spectacle." So do I.

Okay, so remember, I'm trying to find out if I can go ahead and use my formerly-green-now-purple Basil. Then I see on Google, My purple Basil is turning green :( OKAY! I GIVE UP THE GHOST! I'm worried about my green Basil turning purple, and she's worried about her purple Basil turning green. Isn't that the honest-to-goodness limit?? A happy solution for all might be that we should just switch Basil. TA-DA! BTW, I only grazed the surface of Basil, the Bottomless Pit. And, in case you're wondering, I USED MY PURPLE BASIL. It was the best. Oh, and along the way I discovered you can vote YES or NO on Cilantro, "the most offensive food known to man."

KEM, who is not forgetting to plant her different varieties of Basil 500 feet apart so they won't cross-pollinate, thank you very much. Note: Material and quotes loosely collected from apinchof.com, your wealth of Basil knowledge, I say. Pinch is Sandra Bowens. Other websites offer similar general knowledge of Basil.