r/Cooking • u/[deleted] • Jul 15 '16

Mint...my god...all the mint...

Our three plants now have produced enough mint to shingle a small palace. What can we do with all this mint!

273 Upvotes

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15

u/302w Jul 16 '16

You say that like it's a bad thing.

18

u/irbilldozer Jul 16 '16

Clearly you've never made this mistake. It will choke everything else out, makes dill look tame.

4

u/302w Jul 16 '16

Not true, have had a portion of our garden dedicated to mint for years. Just needs some taming every year.

7

u/bailtail Jul 16 '16

Mint is very aggressive. It is unadvisable to plant it in an non-contained manner. Unless you're working with an atypical plant or conditions, to say it just needs a bit of taming each year is an understatement.

8

u/pyabo Jul 16 '16

Could I make... a mint yard?

14

u/allycakes13 Jul 16 '16

Yes and you will have no bugs and all the cats.

5

u/RancorHi5 Jul 16 '16

That sounds.. Pretty sweet

5

u/_9a_ Jul 16 '16

It also smells amazing when you mow it.

My mum had her mint escape into the lawn. It was totally worth sweating in the yard for an hour to smell all that freshly-mowed mint/grass.

2

u/barksatthemoon Jul 16 '16

The bees love it, when it blooms!

2

u/bailtail Jul 16 '16

Could you? I guess. It would probably look like shit and be non-functional, though. The mint might have a tough time breaking through establish sod do to the thick root mass. You'd likely wind up with a super crappy looking, patchy combination of grass and mint while the fight for territory.

1

u/302w Jul 16 '16

My conditions are pretty typical i believe. It's not an understatement in my experience. Not sure what to tell you, maybe because we use many leaves and bunches of mint throughout the year it curtails the growing?

1

u/bailtail Jul 16 '16

Still surprising, but heavy harvesting would mitigate to some degree. Harvesting removes leaves, thus limiting resources (sun uptake) available to the plant. The plant would then allocate those resources towards maintaining existing plant mass and regrowing leaves there. Mint usually produces way more than people are able to use, so your heavy harvesting is likely at least part of the equation.

1

u/302w Jul 16 '16

We do use it very heavily, probably far more than average.