Grow this vegetable on your balcony: tasty, pretty, and easy to care for, with leaves as beautiful as a potted plant

Perilla is an annual herbaceous plant. Its leaves have a distinctive fragrance. There is green-leaved perilla and purple-red perilla. It is not only edible but can also be used for colds and the like. If you add some perilla when cooking fish, it will be especially delicious. Perilla is extremely easy to grow and needs almost no care. Perilla can generally be sown in spring and autumn. As long as your balcony gets plenty of sunlight, you can grow a pot of perilla yourself.

Grow a pot of this vegetable on your balcony: easy to grow, pretty to look at, nice to smell, and delicious, coming back year after year and growing so vigorously it fills the pot!

When sowing, prepare perilla seeds; as long as they are not expired, that is fine. Ordinary soil will do, and garden soil gathered from outside can be used for growing it. It is not strict about soil and can grow in sandy soil or clay soil. After sowing, cover with a thin layer of soil and water thoroughly. Generally, seedlings emerge in about a week.

After germination, make sure it gets a few hours of sunlight each day. Give it plenty of sun. There is no need to water too much; water only when you see the soil has dried out.

If you feel the seedlings are planted too densely, you can pull out some of the weaker ones. After the seedlings grow larger, they need plenty of water and fertilizer. You can water with a little nutrient solution or organic fertilizer water. As the leaves grow, you can pick the tender leaves to eat. As long as the plant has grown to a certain size, you can pick tender stems and leaves to eat at any time.

If you do not eat it, you can also keep it for ornamental value, because its leaves are purple-red and very beautiful, just like a potted plant. If you want it to bloom and produce seeds, then stop pinching off the tops and harvesting.

After a while, small flowers will bloom at the top, and it will also produce many fragrant seeds. These seeds can be collected and kept for sowing next year, or you can just leave them alone. After Xiaoya grew perilla in a flower pot for a year, the seeds later fell into the pot by themselves when they matured, and the next year many small perilla seedlings sprouted and grew especially vigorously. It has strong, tenacious vitality, and wherever the seeds fall, they grow. It really is a potted vegetable that is beautiful, easy to grow, and delicious.