GardenBasil variety
Lime Basil
✓ In your garden
Lime is a lime basil, ready to start snipping in about 60 days. Bright and citrusy. Basil is a tender warm-season herb — it dies at the first frost, so wait for warm nights to plant it, and pinch out the tops often to keep it bushy and stop it flowering.
“A tender, fragrant basil — pinch it often to keep it bushy.”
Growing basics — shared by every basil
Lime grows like any other basil. The full picture — how deep to plant, spacing, feeding, pests, harvest — lives on the Basil page so it's maintained in one place.
- Sun
- Full Sun
- Spacing (in row)
- 6–12 in
- Row spacing
- 18 in
- Planting depth
- 0.125–0.25 in
- Soil pH
- 6–7.5
- Water
- Moderate
What is Lime good for?
- Fresh & pestoAt its best raw and fresh. Great
- Cooked dishesAdd at the end to keep the aroma. Great
- DryingLoses a lot — freeze it instead. Skip it
From how it grows — kitchens vary.
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Want the full 10/50/90% odds + nearest stations? Open the frost tool →When to plant Lime in your zone
Zone 6bGreenhouse or cover on: your start slides ~4 weeks earlier and your harvest stretches ~3 weeks later (shown striped).
Planting seeds straight in the ground only works where the season's long and warm — most gardeners start seeds indoors or buy young plants, or you'd pick your first tomato right as frost hits.
Comfortable — first ripe fruit lands around mid Jun, well before your typical frost (~late Oct).
- Start seeds indoors
- mid Feb – mid Mar
- Toughen up outside
- late Apr – early May
- Move plants outside
- early May – early May
- Plant seeds outside
- mid Apr – early May
- Growing
- early May – mid Jun
- Picking
- mid Jun until frost (~late Oct)
Typical dates for zone 6b — set your zone or ZIP above for yours.
What to plant near Lime — and what to keep away
-
TomatoTrialed
Basil can cut thrips numbers on tomatoes, and a modest yield gain shows up when it is planted at good density. They also want the same heat and water, so the bed suits both.
-
PepperTraditional
Same bed conditions, same kitchen destiny.
The badge is the honesty. Trialed = a published field trial · Practical = a real mechanism · Traditional = companion-chart lore. These pairings hold for every basil.
Pairings compiled from University of Minnesota Extension, West Virginia University Extension.
Growing Lime — the things that trip people up
- Pinch basil often, taking the top pair of leaves above a lower set — it branches into a bushy plant instead of a lanky one, and gives you far more leaf.
- The moment you see flower buds, pinch them off. Flowering turns the leaves bitter and tells the plant it’s done — keep it from flowering and it produces for months, until frost.
Lime basil at a glance
| Type | Lime |
|---|---|
| Days to ripe | 60 days after you plant it outside |
| Color | Green |
Extra fields from seed-catalog listings and university growing guides. Days to ripe and disease resistance shift with your climate and seed source — double-check with your local extension office before you buy.
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Common questions about Lime
How do I keep Lime producing?
Pinch the tops often to keep it bushy, and pinch off any flower buds the moment they appear — flowering turns the leaves bitter and slows new growth.
How long until I can pick Lime?
You can start snipping leaves in about 60 days, and keep cutting until the first frost kills it.
Browse more basil varieties →