Thursday, March 18, 2010

The Taming of the Mint

Being a gardener with very little brain sometimes I do dumb to extremely dumb things.

Like, plant mint in my herb garden... unpartitioned and not in a container >_<.

My mom in law warned me about its invasiveness... which I was aware of and breezily said, "Oh, I'll just keep it in check by making lots of mint tea all the time..."

Ha. ha. ha.  Yeah, it's jumped a mini barrier I had and now I have been digging the undershoots up and laying down some cans to create a barrier.  At this point, I don't think there's any chance I can eradicate it at this point, not like I want to either, but it does need to be tamed/kept tame.


(I still need more cans to fill the barrier up, and so I guess a lot of canned tomatoes need to be eaten soonish :)  (I think I'm going to try a double barrier too, which I suspect might be futile, but hey I can hope)

They really need a garden tool that looks like a lion tamer's whip to handle this.  Oh... oh yeah, I did win a cobra head tool (thanks again Anneliese!) a while back... probably a good start to my hot minty mess.

It's such a a pity too, because while I like mint, my husband doesn't for the most part (he can't even handle mint toothpaste).  He does fine with it in certain ethnic food dishes, but yeah, at my house I am the mint consumer of the year.

Mint, like basil is also one of those great herb types that have a  MILLION varieties that sound great.  I'm rescuing a chocolate variety that got pot bound and sucked up water like mad and was thus sick and dried out for a while, but they're real survivors... too good almost.  Like the roaches of a post apocalyptic plant world.  But yes, variety!  Lemons, limes, Vietnamese versions... so many it's astounding, but unless I have some good pots or a field... no extra mints for me.

(Augh! There goes ones now... getting between the cracks towards freedom!)

Mint! The natural FreshMaker!(Please don't sue me Mentos!)