One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Okay, to be more positive, it's more like one step forward, one step back.

 

Despite the fact that when one plants mint in the garden, and one is warned that the mint must be contained or it will spread and choke out all other plantings, I've not found this to be true.  

 

But when I first started growing mint, I was cautious and dedicated one 8' x 4' raised bed to the mint.

 

For some reason I can't understand, each spring I find bare spots in the bed.  So I purchase three or four more mint plants from a greenhouse to "fill in."  The plants, whether the old or new ones, never seem to spread and totally fill in the bed.  Nope, it's never looked as though my mint will go crazy and take over our acreage.

 

With the growing season well underway this year, you can see the bare spots in my mint bed.

 

This is disturbing because I need to grow a lot of mint since each year I dry and use a great quantity of it.  Papa Pea has a large cup of mint tea every morning after a cup of coffee.  Plus, our daughter has a friend with a lot of tummy troubles and she's found drinking our mint tea helps her digestion like no other mint she's found.  So it's important to me to grow as much of it as I can.

 

To this end, this year I decided to put in a second bed of mint.  But this spring I couldn't find any peppermint plants (which is the kind of mint I want) in any of our nearby greenhouses.  Friends were going to visit relatives down state, knew of a large greenhouse there and said they would look for peppermint plants for me.

 

I was very appreciative when they brought me twelve very healthy looking plants which I put in a vacant raised bed. 

 

The plants took hold nicely and have already started to send out shoots to fill the spaces between the plants.

 

However, there's a problem with this new mint.

 

Does it look like peppermint?  Yes.  Does it smell like peppermint?  No.  Does it taste like peppermint?  No.  It has very little aroma or flavor.  And what it does have, doesn't resemble peppermint.  Or any other kind of mint.  It's a mystery.

 

Today I pulled out all the new plants.  They had very healthy root systems (I had to use a shovel to loosen them from the soil) that were probably at least 12" across.

 

So perhaps I am back to the one step forward, two steps back.  I'll now have to wait another year to start my second peppermint bed in order to make sure I can harvest and dehydrate as much mint as I want.

 

It's not a terrible, awful, bad predicament to have when other gardeners are experiencing severe drought or too much moisture or a serious invasion of insects as is one gardener in our area who has lost about 80% of her garden to grasshoppers.

 

I've thought about starting my own peppermint plants from seeds.  But even at that, I won't know if the plant leaves smell or taste like peppermint until they're big enough to show their true colors.  Best I plan on a determined search of greenhouses within a 200 mile radius next spring giving the old sniff test and maybe even surreptitiously munching a leaf or two.  Just to be sure.