Yo, yo, what up this is John Kohler with Growingyourgreens.com I have another exciting episode for you today.
What we're going to do today is talk about mint. We're going to talk about transplanting
mint and also making some cuttings of mint or propagate mint. The first thing before
planting you always want to water your plants before planting, so you want to get them nice
and wet, we're going to wet this guy down nice and good. We're going to let this guy
soak a bit. Now mint is what I call an invasive plant.
Know what that means? You can plant it somewhere and it's going to take over. So this can be
a good think if you have an area or space that you want dedicate to only growing mint
because it may choke out other things that are trying to grow there. So for this reason
I highly encourage you to plant mint in a pot in many cases. You want to get the largest
size pot you can, this happens to be a fairly large one.
If you can't afford or buy pots you can also get a free five gallon bucket outside a deli
or something that they normally ship olives or pain or whatever. Make sure you clean it
out really good if you're reusing a bucket that had paints or things in there.
You're going to pop some holes in the bottom and fill it up with a nice mixture of compost
and some soil. Also I would encourage you to add some vermiculite or coco peat or peat
moss to hold the moisture. Mint doesn't like it too wet but they don't like it too dry.
They probably don't like being too dry and they could probably handle some level of wetness.
Besides growing in a container if you don't want to grow in a container because there
are pros and cons to containers especially in a hot summer. The containers because they
are exposed to more airflow or more warmth they tend to dry out quicker. So unless you're
constantly going around and watering, your mint plants may drive out in which case you
will lose them. So the alternative that I'm going to show
you guys today is planting mint in a raised bed. Now I never encourage you to plant mint
alone in a raised bed without using this technique because it's once again, it's going to spread
and take over the whole bed. You can see here what we've already done,
I've already done three mint plants, we have a chocolate mint and man there are so many
varieties of mint, this mint it literally smells like chocolate, it's absolutely amazing,
I don't have a smell-o-vision through the YouTube yet but you got to take my word for
it, it's an amazing, it's probably one of my favorite mints. Over here we had cordifolia
mint. And over here we have mint the best. So these are some more standard common varieties,
but there's even varieties like cotton candy mint and I've never had that one yet, but
supposedly smells like cotton candy. There's so many different mints available in the world,
and I encourage you to grow as wide variety as you can.
Each mint has different uses, of course all these mints can easily be made into a tea,
you can add them to flavor desserts, flavor smoothies and even flavor juices or put a
few in your soups of if you're making wraps chop up a few in your wraps, once again a
little bit of mint goes a long way when using it culinarily. Is that a word?
So anyway let's get onto transplanting. As you can see I'm going to plant these in the
raised bed and we're planting these in pots. So if you are going to use this technique
I always encourage you to use a real world material, not man-made material, pots in your
raised bed. So in this case we have some ceramic pots
which is a natural material. The thing I like about ceramic is that it will wick and hold
moisture and let it go. So you can kind of see in here, part of this pot here is nice
and dark that's because it's holding moisture and part of this pot is a little bit lighter
because it doesn't have any moisture in there. Likewise the moisture will transfer from the
soil, through the pot and into the plant and also through the hole in the bottom it will
actually wick up moisture if the plant needs it, so that's always going to be a nice feature,
so your plants or your mint is not going to dry out as much if you put it in a pot in
your raised bed versus having it alone. Now we're doing this because mint likes to
root out in multiple ways so it likes to spread out underneath the ground, the roots like
to spread, and then pop up new plants, or new shoots and also what will happen, even
in this case, is that here's a good example maybe on this chocolate mint, it'll grow over
the edge and what'll happen is on these little nodes here, you can kind of see some, it starts
to send out roots. So even though we're planting this in here,
it won't spread by the roots but this will drag over, hit the ground, if the ground's
wet then it'll root out some more. So there's no way to prevent mint from doing this, except
not grow it in your raised bed if you don't want it to spread. Now if it does spread,
if you catch it early enough you can actually clip them out and replant them and put them
in a new pot. Another really neat thing you can do with
any mint is you can literally just take a scissors and snip it off. And then you're
going to put this in a glass of water for a few days and you're going to see roots develop
at the cut point. Once the root develops at the cut point, then you're going to transplant
that into a little pot with some soil, keep it watered, and guess what, you got a new
mint plant. I've even gone so far as to get some exotic varieties of mint at gardens,
I'll actually go and dig up not just a cutting, but a little bit of roots because all it takes
is a little bit, you can pot it up and it's going to grow into a whole new plant.
In any case, let's go ahead now and plant this mint in this pot, in the raised bed.
I've basically dug a little hole here so the pot will fit in nicely. And I raised it a
little bit above ground level. Now you could put this at ground level, and even cover it
a little bit so you don't actually see the pot under the ground. If you do that there's
more of a chance of mint of running on you or getting away and getting out of your pot.
So I guess the next thing we're going to do, we're just go ahead and fill this pot up with
a little bit of my compost mix here. So we'll have compost, some peat moss, or coconut core,
and some vermiculite mixed in there. So we're going to line the bottom with that.
We're then going to take our scissors and cut this label off, and we're going to take
a look at the roots here. And the roots have been growing pretty good in here. And we're
going to take this whole peat pot off. Now I had another episode on peat pots and you'll
always want to remove your peat pots before planting if you don't remove the peat pots
the peat pots actually restrict the growth of the roots.
Once you have all the peat pot off then you're going to basically tease the roots out, I
like to just take it and just pull them out a little bit, break them up from the circle
orientation that they may have been growing in because they're going to continue to grow
in circles if you don't do this. The next step is I like to use some mycorrhizae,
I'm using the great white premium mycorrhizae, this has many different varieties of mycorrhizae,
but also the beneficial bacteria, and you just need a little bit on the roots. And that
should do it. We're then going to go ahead and place this
in the pot, and always when potting things up I like to pot it up at about the level
of the pot. So in this situation I don't have enough compost in the bottom, we're going
to fill it up a little bit more. And that's about a good level for me. And then we're
just going to go ahead and carefully dump in the rest of the compost.
So that's pretty much it, once you're in and you got all the soil in you're not yet done
because the last thing you want to do always when transplanting is give it a nice water.
Give it some water to help reduce the transplant shock.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed learning about the mint today, how to propagate it, how to
plant it in a raised bed and I would encourage everybody to grow mint especially if you're
not growing your food. Grow mint, it's one of the easiest things to keep alive and it
tastes so good. Once again my name is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com. We'll see
you next time and keep on growing.