The Mint Garden Project – Saving the Bees

Mint is a truly amazing plant

There are numerous species and cultivars of mint, and even most herbs you use in the kitchen are in the Lamiaceae family of plants along with mint. They are almost always perennial, have strong square stems, and expand by making runners underground.

Because they make runners underground a lot of people avoid mints, but I feel that if you’re trying to grow something, you should be so lucky as to have such a vigorous plant. Worse case you can dig up and pot the runners to expand your garden, or give them to friends. They not only make great herbal teas, and produce tons of flowers which attract pollinators from bees to hummingbirds, but almost all of them have major potential medicinal properties.

Here in the USA, the Food and Drug Administration will destroy your life for saying something can be used to treat or cure an illness if its not made by their multi billion dollar buddies, but numerous studies have shown the compounds in the various species of mints have potential antiviral and antibacterial properties, along with other specific medical benefits.

In fact, if you look at all the top plants that pollinators are really attracted to, they all have potential medical benefits and are the base of traditional medicine. It makes sense if you think about it, plants were dealing with fending off viruses, bacteria, and fungi long before any animal even stepped on land. They have an immune system in the form of the chemical compounds they produce, which protects them from everything from disease to pests. It would only be natural for bees to be attracted to plants which produce compounds which can keep themselves healthy.

Bees around the world are disappearing in mass. Its really not a surprise considering how much pesticide is sprayed to kill mosquitoes, farm crops are sprayed with poison to kill pests, people cover their lawns in insect killing granules, pollution, and a thousand other things. There are also numerous parasites which have become a major problem for bees, but even so, these parasites don’t necessarily directly kill the bees, they wind up making them sick with the equivalent of bee bronchitis.

Over the years I’ve collected over 24 varieties of perennial herbs in the mint family, from apple mint, to oregano, thyme, hyssop, agastache, and bee balm. I decided in order to help my bees out, along with the wild pollinator populations, I would grow a huge mint garden. I started by planting all of the varieties in a very high raised row, with rich sandy soil. I spaced the plants about 4 feet apart and allowed them to make runners, and the sandy soil makes it easy to dig them up without damaging them.

Now that it’s spring, the plants have exploded, and there are hundreds of new shoots coming up from the runners. Another great property of mint, is that it roots very easily. If you bend a shoot down and cover it with moist soil, it will produce roots and you can then snip it off and plant it elsewhere. You can also take a shoot and snip it off and put it in a glass of water and the cutting will grow roots all on its own.

 

A lot of the mint plants already have 4-6″ tall shoots, which I am beginning to cut and place in a little cloning system I made. The cloning system is basically just a big flat plastic tote, and I cut a grid of around 21 holes in the lid. I fill the tote with water, have a small aquarium bubbler for aeration to keep the water oxygenated and moving to stimulate root growth, and simply put 5 or so freshly cut shoots in each hole. Typically in 3-10 days depending on variety, the cuttings will have enough roots to be transplanted in a 3″ pot.

After potting the cuttings I keep them moist for a week, and by this time the roots have expanded to fill the pot and are strong enough to transplant into the ground. Also, once the plants have recovered a little from me taking extensive cuttings from them, I will wait for a rainy day to dig them up and divide them. The base plants will get big enough to typically split into 4 or more plants, and the runners can be cut into numerous plants.

I’m preparing an area to plant all the mint, and in a span of two years I will have went from single 3″ potted mints of each varieties, to a row of 4 foot wide sprawling plants, to around 100 foot long rows of each variety. These rows will produce tons of long lasting flowers, as well as allow me to harvest an enormous amount of herbs to sell. Eventually I’ll also be able to make tens of thousands of cuttings to sell mint commercially once I get a nursery license.

Down the road, I very well may plant a block of rows of a few specific varieties to produce in bulk, and simply let them completely take over the square of land.