[music] so when trying to grow mint you will see that there are a lot of common varieties of mint that are available for you to purchase at your garden store so let's review some of these varietiessweet mint is the most common type of mint that you can find it's got large leaves and is pretty much an all-around versatile mint then you have spearmint which is used for a lot of recipes that you would seeyou have peppermint which can be used to prepare
peppermint teas and a lot of other drinks and then youhave the flavored mint which are very special varieties of mints like chocolate mint are pineapple mint which can add minty flavors to a lot of thingsnow here's a little trivia for you if a recipe doesn't specify which mint to use what would be the mint that you'd use?alright...ready for the answer? if you guessed spearmint, then you're absolutely right when people just say mint, they mean spearmint
or just listen to your taste buds and use the mint that you like the most! so let's take a look at each of these varieties in detail sweet mint is bred for larger leaves and a mint flavor that is pretty much a neutral flavor that can be used in alot of dishes for preparing drinks, teas, its commonly available and easy to growpeppermint is a type of mint which is a type of hybrid mint and it has a very high menthol content so it feels more like
your chewing gum or toothpaste kind ofmint very intense flavor and great for making a lot of drinks spearmint is the mostcommon variety of mine that you will use a very very versatile mint it can be usedin a lot of kitchen recipes can be used to flavoryour drinks your teas and it has a lot of healthbenefits so if you're looking to will startgrowing anyone can of mint i would highly recommend that you startgrowing spearmint it's very easy to grow
and a very versatile mint flavored mints like chocolate mint, apple mint, pineapple man have any specific purposes so if you havea recipe that requires certain flavors and mint this may be a good thing tostart growing in your garden and you can also use flavored mints in alot of drinks and the impart very special flavors to thosedrinks mint is generally never had grown fromseeds the reasons being its not only very difficult to grow them because their germination rate is not so good the plants that grow from them
do not resemble their parents so it'snot a good idea to grow them from seed instead what you can do is take somecuttings like these here and put them in a bowlof water and then add some dirt in it and thatencourages the mint shoots to give out these roots thatyou can see. so as soon as you have some roots here you can transplant these into pots and they will start growing just like a newmint plant so if you have friends that cangive you mint cuttings
that's the easiest way to propagatemint now if you do not have mint cuttings you can buy mint plants or herbs from your local garden center and thenplant them to plant mint you need to usecontainers that are wide and not deep because mint sendsout sprawling wines which will go all aroundyour container so a container of this size is is good enoughfor growing mint so there are two spearmint
plants that we have here which we are planting in this pot so we take out the plant from the given pot and then we plant it on to our wider container and you can try to loosen the roots on the bottom a little bit so they start growing in a better way but even if youjust place them around the container an add some dirtaround it they should do a fairly good job mint is a very invasive plant
so never ever plant mint directly on the ground i don't see anyreason why you should be growing mint on the ground because it will just take over your yardand all the plants around itits a very vigorous and invasive plant so most pf the timeyou would grow mint in containers like these and they should last for at least a yearor so in a container of this size this is another container that you canuse it is slightly deeper
so again wide as well so great to grow mint and we will beplanting our second spearmint plant in thiscontainer so i'm using a bagged potting mix here that i got from a local garden center and then what i do is i add some perliteto it to increase the volumeyou could either add perlite or vermiculite and then take the plant and just remove just a littlebit of the soil from below to stimulate the roots a little bitand then add the remaining soil
around the plant and this is pretty muchthe perfect size container for growing mint it's not too deep and its wide enough for the plant tosend out its vines and once the planting is done alwaysremember to water your plant make sure it gets a nice soaking before you set it out mint best grows in either partial shade or light sun although you can grow mintin full sun
i've seen that the best mint grows inpartial shade so i'm using this vertical growing rack here and i'll probably do a videoof this cheaply available vertical growingsolution that i recently bought and you cangrow a lot of herbs vegetables in this storage rack and here you see the two mint plants that we just planted now once every year you need to pruneand maintain you mint plant so what does that mean?
after about ayear your mint will have grown soinvasive that it won't have any more space to grow so it will not produce the good quality mint that you expect it to produce so what you do here is your is you find somesmall plants which you separate out from this big plant and then start it in a new container so here you can see one we can try tofind a couple more that's a good one that has good roots
and nice healthy leaves so you need tofind candidates like this one maybe find like 4 or 5 and then start growing them in aseparate container now some people like to do this everyyear some people do it every two years i would say just go by what you feel if you feel your mint plant is crowdedand is not producing good leaves then it's time to re-pot you can either plant them in the same container by usingnew soil or you can use the cuttings
or the plants and plant them and abrand new container so in our case we will be planting our mint plant that we separated from the parent plant we're gonna to plant all theseplants in this container adding fresh potting mix and once youadd the potting mix i'd like to use a little bit of extra perlite which improves the oxygen that reaches the roots, it improves porosity
and i've noticed that the more porousthe medium the better the plants grow and what you dois just plant these mint plants just like that and what this will dois that it will give the mint plant a lot more space it will give the roots a lot more space to grow which means that you will be getting alot of new offshoots from your mint plan that you can startusing right away so i am planting four of these plants here
and mint grows throughout the year sothe mint plant grows and produces these nice-looking mint leaves you can cut these stemsthese mint stems and use them and what will happen isafter just a few weeks the mint plant willcontinue to send more shoots and then you can keep harvesting them so mint is a real joy to grow there's nothing that tastes like freshmint from your garden its a very nice herb that you can easygrow
in your garden and it really requires minimal care the only insect i see on the mintplant sometimes are slugs and sometimes i see some spider mitesbut all in all they've not been a real problem to my mintplants at all i always get nice healthy mint leavesand as you can see and as you can see i've chopped off the tops of theseyou know these mint leaves and taken them and in just a few weeksyou can see that the mint plant has sent out the small shoots and once thesesmall shoots grow
you should see that the mint plant will growback to almost what it was when you started harvesting them so allin all a very easy plant to grow so do you grow mint? let me know what variety of mint you grow i'll see you again soon...happy gardening