Mint Garden
Garden Mint In Your Herb Garden
There are many different kinds of mints that can be grown in your garden. By far the most popular are spearmint and peppermint types. This herb is great for gardeners as it grows almost everywhere and returns year after year without much care.
A mint garden can be troublesome for beginner gardeners, as it has a habit of trying to take over your entire garden! A good technique to prevent your garden from being overrun is to grow this herb as part of a potted herb garden, the pots should keep it under control. Be careful about feeding it too much with fertilizers as this can cause it to become uncontrollable.
This rapid growth isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as a small cutting from these herbs can be planted in another garden and it will quickly grow into a full plant. Therefore you and your friends can share this herb with each other easily and it saves you having to grow this plant from seed which can be tricky.
Growing Mint
The mint herb has a number of advantages to other herbs. One of the big advantages is how versatile this it is. It grows in the kind of soils that most other herbs would die in. The only important thing is to make sure that it remains moist. Many gardeners mist their mint using a spray can outside its regular watering sessions, so that your mint garden gets a little bit of water but does not get flooded. Luckily your watering sessions can be very far apart with this plant, as it can survive everything bar a drought. Some gardeners try to reduce the amount of watering to almost zero by using perlite or mulch to maximize the water they give it.
This herb grows well as an indoor herb. Unlike other herbs mint tends to grow better with some shade. This makes it great for smaller apartments/ houses that don’t get much sunshine. Many gardeners erect a cover, so that it gets lots of sunshine early in the day when the sun is in a lower position, then is shaded later in the day. This mixture of light and dark should see your herbs grow rapidly.
Harvest Time
When it is time to harvest your herbs you want to make sure that you harvest this herb early on a dry, late summer morning as it is prone to losing the oils that give it its flavor in sunlight or rain. As a general rule this herb is best harvested before the flowers have a chance to develop.
The most popular use for mint is in tea herb gardening. It is a great tisane herb as it goes really well when mixed with almost any flavor. To make the herb suitable for making a drink, you will want to dry it either on a rack or by hanging it upside down in a dark, cool place. Once dry it can easily be crumpled into small particles suitable for making tea.
Many gardeners also choose to freeze this herb. Unfortunately this costs a little bit of the flavor, but it can be a good way to save your harvest for a warm summer day when it can be added to drinks or a cool dessert. It goes fantastically well with ice cream and chocolate-based desserts.
It can also make a great fresh sauce for lamb, by simply preserving the mint in vinegar and adding honey/ sugar to taste.
The best part is that mint has long been used for its medicinal properties. It has been linked with cold treatments and clearing up headaches, so you get great medicinal benefits too!
To read the next article in this series about growing a thyme herb garden click here.
