How to Grow TONS of Mint (And Not Let it Take Over)

In today's video I'm going to 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 of 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. Its 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 of 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 can't really map the taste to the, 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 going to show you right now. So here is a pretty neglected pot of mint. And 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 going to 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 want to run, they want to produce more mint and then there's just some normal roots as well. So this is where you got to get a little brutal and you really don't need to be afraid whatsoever. You can take scissors, you can take shears, whatever. I'm going to take a little small handsaw and actually just cut this apart. Cause what's crazy about mints 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 and 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 you 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 mints. So what you're going to 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 going to do is come into the mint and we're going to just look for a nice branch that we don't mind slipping away. So I'm going to come in here. And what you want to 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 going to bring the camera in closer and show you what I'm talking about. What we want to do is get in close to where the plant is actually contacting the soil. And we're going to in particular look at this 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. And 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, uh, right there next to my thumb, there's a couple of little roots hanging out and these roots are totally fine to transplant now. Oh, there's a good shot. So you could actually just shove this in a 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 want to do is take a section of mint that has multiple leaf nodes, and we're going to actually strip those leaves off by just simply running our fingers down. So now 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 want to take a section of plant. I'm going to 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 of weeks time, this will start producing roots. In 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 want to 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 pot it's 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 kind of loosen the root matter. It really does get crazy with mint. You would not believe how fast it can tangle itself up. So you want to 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 will grow like this for pretty much an entire season. And then you get 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 want to 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'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 want to come out and harvest it right in the beginning of the morning. With mint, right about now, this is about 11am, 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 going to 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 going to 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 grows so fast, you're going to 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 going to 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 want to worry about mint. Until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing. Come here. Okay. She doesn't want to play with me right now. So I'm just going to take my mint and go inside.