- In today's video, I'm gonna show you how to grow
one of the most popular herbs of all time,
mint without letting it take over your garden.
I have a ton of different varieties of mint
in this raised bed, which I'm excited to share with you.
But first, just a couple quick tips on mint care.
It's a simple plant to grow guys.
Very simple.
You want ample light, not too much, though.
It can be in a little bit of shade.
You want a moist soil that is rich in organic matter.
The real one thing you can do wrong with mint
as far as its care goes is just letting the soil dry out.
There's these rhizomes in there,
there's roots in there.
It tends to want a lot of water.
It's a fast grower, so just don't let it dry out.
And now let's go through
a little bit of the history of this plant
and some of the coolest varieties you can grow.
So mint is a fascinating plant.
It's origins are somewhat unknown.
It's kind of all around the world now.
And no one can really trace it down
to one particular location.
One thing that's crazy about it
is while there are tons of different varieties,
which I'll mention in a second
they all share the same stem characteristic,
the stems themselves, if you really give them a feel
are sort of squarish in shape.
They're not really round.
Besides that the leaf, the flavor, the smell,
all varies greatly.
So here's a couple varieties
that I personally like, some classics.
This one's spearmint, the classic one
that you can find in a gum.
What's interesting about this one
is you can't really grow it from seed.
It must be propagated vegetatively
which I'll show you in a second.
You've got peppermint here.
That's just an absolute classic.
And then here's an example of one
a little bit overgrown if I do say so.
This is pineapple mint and it really does have that scent.
There's also apple mint, orange mint, chocolate mint
all sorts of different types that really
do smell the way that they're named.
Not necessarily taste.
Sometimes I, I can't really map the taste to the scent,
but hey, it's still something fun to experiment with
if you go out to the store.
I might have five or 10 different varieties of mint
popping in all over the garden
and they grow particularly well in containers,
which I'm gonna show you right now.
So here is a pretty neglected pot of mint.
You can see it probably was nice
and bushy at some point in the past
but now it's kind of scraggly
and just some outskirts of little cuttings here
that have tried to survive.
So what we're gonna do is a full on reset.
You can see this pot's even a little bit broken here.
Roots are trying to come out.
So what we want to do,
so we might have to massage this out just a bit.
Let's get it out here.
All right, this is a little more stuck in
than we thought, isn't it guys?
What mint wants to do is run.
And if you don't let it run, you end up getting a situation
where maybe it's even the mint that caused
that crack in that pot
'cause it really wants to go.
So this is really tight in here.
There we go, that did it.
As you can see, here are the rhizomes they wanna run.
They wanna produce more mint
and then there's just some normal roots as well.
So this is where you gotta get a little brutal
and you really don't need to be afraid whatsoever.
You can take scissors, you can take shearers
whatever I'm gonna take a little small hand saw
and actually just cut this apart.
'Cause what's crazy about mint in containers
is it really does tend to displace the soil.
So as you can see, this was obviously once full of soil.
But if we cut this in half, yeah
there's soil in here for sure,
but there's also a ton of root mass.
And so let's say I wanted four new mint plants.
Well that's very easy.
I'll just cut this into quarters here.
Cut this one right here.
What I can do is kind of tease this apart as well.
I can kind of hack off the bottom.
We don't really need that stuff down there.
We still have some mint going up top.
We can pull can pull out some of these at least.
All we need is this much.
That's really it.
And then if we were to take this
and pot it back up in a fresh pot of soil, in fact
we could probably even use some of this stuff here
now that it's been freed of the mint mayhem.
But what you would do is just reset
into a new container,
pop it in just like this
put some soil around it and you're good to go.
And they could do this with this mint,
with this mint, whatever.
So this is a good way to reset an overgrown mint container.
- Hey, this is Jacques from Jacques in the Garden.
And today we're going to be talking about propagating mint.
So what you're gonna need is a clip, a knife
something like that, a nice pot of soil or multiple pots.
And if you want also you could just use a cup of water.
So the first thing we're gonna do is come into the mint
and we're going to just look for a nice branch
that we don't mind snipping away.
So I'm gonna come in here and what you wanna get
is a branch that has multiple leaf nodes,
because what we're going to do
is actually strip off those leaves.
And I'll talk a little bit about why we're doing that.
The other option you do have is actually to dig
around the plant, but I'm gonna bring the camera in closer
and show you what I'm talking about.
What we wanna do is get in close
to where the plant is actually contacting the soil.
And we're going to in particular
look at the section right here,
where we have multiple branches
making contact with the soil.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come in
and clip where I see the start of these
then we'll take a closer look.
Oh yeah.
So that's exactly what I was thinking.
This actually has roots.
So you could see, right there next to my thumb.
There's a couple little roots hanging out
and these roots are totally fine the transplant now.
Oh that is a good shot.
So you could actually just shove this into pot of soil
which we're going to do right now.
Well, you can see on the example
that I actually clipped from the ground
is that the roots are coming out where the leaf nodes are.
So what we wanna do is take a section of mint
that has multiple leaf nodes
and we're gonna actually strip those leaves off
by just simply running our fingers down.
So now I any one of these points
where the leaves originally were can now produce roots.
So what we'll do is we'll just take a cup of water
throw the cutting in after maybe a week
you'll start seeing the little roots
and in two weeks or so, you'll start seeing much more roots.
And at that point you could just transplant it out.
So that's option one.
That's the easiest.
The other option you have is to take some soil
and just directly grow your plant.
It's the same principle.
You wanna take a section of plant,
now go ahead and trim that
and find where there's a leaf node, strip the leaves off.
You could even go back a couple
and you have a few options here.
You could just shove it in the pot
keep it somewhere semi-shaded
and make sure it gets enough moisture.
And that will produce roots.
The other option you have
is that you could also just lay it down
in some soil like this, take a little extra, bury it in.
So that's really all there is to it.
You could just let that sit.
In a couple weeks' time this will start producing roots
and these pots you'll be able to see them
coming out the side.
At that point, you could really just plant it out
and that's as easy as it is for mint propagation.
- If you wanna control your mint
the only foolproof way is to force it to grow
in something like this, where it can't spread.
Just a classic container.
So here's a mint that we have.
It's not too root bound.
This is something that you might find at the local nursery.
And when you're potting it up
from what you buy at the nursery, it spreads so quickly
that I would say, you know,
typically when you like pot up a house plant,
you say, oh, you pot it up an inch bigger
than the pots already in.
With mint, you could go a little bit larger.
This is just about at that inch point.
So what I would do is I would just scratch the sides up
just a little bit, just to kinda loosen the root matter.
It really does get crazy with mint.
You would not believe how fast it can tangle itself up.
So you wanna open it up a little bit
and then just pop it in.
And what you'll do is take some potting soil
and just backfill around this and this'll grow
like this for pretty much an entire season.
And then you into some of the propagation techniques
that help you take one mint plant
and either turn it into many or reset it
when it outgrows this pot
and start the process all over again.
We're back out here in this front mint bed.
And I wanna do a little cleanup and harvest
and kind of talk about some of the ways
that you can do this.
And guess who just showed up?
Babka 'cause she's hungry for some mint.
So let's harvest some for her as well.
So mint, unlike a lot of herbs or greens,
you know something like lettuce,
you probably wanna come out and harvest it
right in the beginning of the morning.
With mint right about now this is about 11:00 a.m.
is a great time to harvest it.
So I can come through and just harvest more or less
as much as I want.
And when you harvest
you want to cut right above a leaf node
because you're gonna get branching out both sides.
So I can also sort of landscape and prune this mint
at the same time that I'm harvesting.
It's a great time because the aromatics are high
right before noon.
So you kind of get it at its peak freshness.
So I'm taking a few sprigs there.
That's gonna force this to bush up quite a bit.
And I want to clean up some of these other ones here too.
And then we can talk about some of the uses for mint.
Some of our favorite uses is what we call herb water
which is basically just taking a Mason jar full of water.
You can throw in mints and sprigs and maybe
every few days just replace them.
Mint grow so fast, you're gonna gonna have no problem
doing that at all.
And then just one final thing I wanted to touch on
as you grow mint in your garden is yeah,
I have maybe one, two, three, four, five, six
different types of mint here.
Sometimes it has been shown that planting them all together
can tend to make their flavors bland out
and become indistinguishable from one another.
So I haven't noticed it too much in my garden
but a few gardeners that I respect have told me
that that's the case.
So one thing I'm thinking about doing
is maybe putting in dividers.
I still want mint in this bed and I want
all the varieties that I have.
But if I put in some dividers,
not only does that prevent spreading,
but also perhaps it separates the mint out a little bit
and maybe that flavor combination doesn't happen.
I don't know, it's something I'm gonna have to try here
in the garden.
So as I harvest this mint, I really encourage you
to give it a grow this season.
It is one of the easier things.
Remember, containers are your best friend
if you don't wanna worry about mint.
Until next time, good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.
Come here.
Ah, okay she doesn't wanna play with me right now,
so I'm just gonna take my mint and go inside.