Dr. Nate Storey: Hey, this is Nate Storey with Bright Agrotech and today we’re down
here at BayBerry Fresh with Haydn Christensen the owner.
We’re going to be talking about mint today.
Mint is a great crop for zipgrow towers and you can see that Haydn has a lot of mint going
here.
It's a great grower, but it's also a great crop for market.
Why don't you tell us a little about your markets and about the mint you’re growing
here?
Haydn Christensen: Yeah.
It works really good for both home use, consumers at the grocery store and restaurant markets.
It works really good for live towers and cut products, so all round it just really hits
every point.
Dr. Nate Storey: Mint is a great crop because it's a really vigorous grower, but it's also
really easy to propagate, which means you can scale up your system really quickly.
You can increase the amount of mint in your system very rapidly in response to demand.
Often times, once people start selling mint they find the demand grows really quickly,
because most people haven't had really good fresh mint.
It definitely has a shelf life.
Haydn tell me a little bit about your markets; are they growing, are they expanding, what
are you seeing there.
Haydn Christensen: Yeah.
I actually didn't start out with a whole lot of mint.
I've always been adding more and I’m going to be adding three or four times as much this
year.
There's a lot of demand from restaurants.
It's actually the second highest volume herb for me right behind basil.
Also, I found out that bars will use a lot of mint alone and not other herbs and so for
that reason I can get a lot of customers just for mint.
Dr. Nate Storey: You bet.
Bars care a lot about really fresh stuff because the oils and the alcohol, the aromatic compounds
in the mint are really what go into this drink.
They dissolve in the alcohol.
It's what people are tasting.
It’s what people are smelling.
It seems that bars are almost the ultimate market for really fresh mint.
Haydn Christensen: They are because they’re looking for a garnish a lot of times, so looking
for a really nice little sprig and they're willing to pay more for it because they get
a lot of sprigs out of a bag.
They really can provide a higher margin since they’re looking for really premium products.
Dr. Nate Storey: Yeah, you bet.
There's a big difference between just having a product that you grind up or you add to
a dish and having a product that your customers are staring in the eye when it comes on their
drink.
Haydn Christensen: Correct.
Dr. Nate Storey: Mint is a great crop because it's really easy to propagate.
You can propagate it from cuttings, which means that once you got a mature tower then
you can start taking cuttings off of.
Getting more plants is a pretty fast process.
It's also super, super tough.
In our greenhouse we usually just chop it right back to the face of the tower, all the
way back to the crown.
Once the plant has some momentum behind it, it will just keep re-growing.
Not everyone does that.
I know that you do a little bit differently Haydn.
It’s a great crop.
It's very easy to harvest.
Tell us a little bit about how you harvest and propagate here.
Haydn Christensen: Yeah.
As far as harvesting goes, I want to get really consistent high quality sprigs of a certain
length.
When a tower gets to a certain size what I'll do is I'll find those sprigs.
I can get a handful of them and then I can cut them off.
That leaves me either I can cut the tower off clean after that to re-grow or I leave
a little bit of a plant left for a lot of new sprigs to come out of for the next cycle.
Dr. Nate Storey: Starting mint from seed can be a really long process.
Just as a warning, mint seed germination rates are always awesome and they’re a little
bit picky, and they’re slow growers from seed, so you definitely want to be taking
cuttings.
When you take cuttings you basically just drop them in your gutters, right?
Haydn Christensen: Yeah, that's one way of doing it.
Dr. Nate Storey: Yeah.
Haydn just takes his cuttings and he just drops a handful of them down in his gutter
and they'll just root out there, and he can just take them out of his gutter and stick
them in towers as he needs them.
There are lot of different ways to do it.
We've done it from root cuttings before as well.
When towers get overgrown, which they will, with mint they begin to spread the housing.
They begin to destroy the media.
It’s best to take them out and tear out some of that root material.
You can actually put that material right into a brand-new tower.
Just plant it directly to a tower and it will send out shoots.
You can get plants pre-grown or growing right out of your tower just by putting the root
material in a brand-new tower.
Mint is a great crop, and if you're just starting your farm or you’re an up-start farmer you
should definitely be thinking about mint as well as basil.
They're going to be both really marketable and really high margin crops to start with,
and they both grow great in zipgrow towers.
Thanks so much for having us down here today Haydn.
Check out the blog at zipgrow.com if you have more questions.