Making More Mint

Do you love mint plants, and which you could have more, more, and more?   Lucky you, mint is so easy to propagate it takes care of it without any help from you!

You can, and I have, take stem cuttings in the summer, stick them in water and let them root.

But, it's even easier if you do it now, in early spring, when the plants are just coming out of dormancy.  They are sending out underground and ground level runners like crazy, circling their containers around and around again (you do have your mints in containers, don't you?).  Now's the time to divide them, give them new soil, and make a lot of new mint plants.

citrus basil mint

bee balm (of the mint family, it sends out runners and has the same invasive nature)

lemon balm (not an underground or surface runner, it still spreads via its roots)

orange mint runner

woolly apple mint always pops up outside the herb bed!

strawberry mint

spearmint

As you can see from this pineapple mint runner (below) I pulled out today, it has roots all along the runner, with new plants starting above each rooted area, at a node.

pineapple mint runner

pineapple mint runner with "baby plants"

I cut the runner into individual rooted areas, and you can see they are already pineapple mint plants!

I potted each in a small container of potting soil.  

Last week I planted lemon balm, sweet pear mint and citrus basil mint in the same way.  Already they have grown tremendously.  It's rare to have a rooted mint segment fail to thrive.  When they do I find that particular pot just was in the wrong place and missed the rain. 

Coyote mint, a mint family member in the Pycnanthemum genus, doesn't die back like the balms and menthas (although it sure has a minty aroma, a crushed leaf smells like toothpaste!), or send out runners.  I thought I'd try layering (rooting while the stem is still attached to the mother plant) since mine has some stems growing on the soil surface.  I dug a little trench, lay a stem in that, covered it with soil, and weighted it down with a rock.

I have had rosemary and thyme layer themselves by just naturally growing a stem on the soil surface!  All I had to do was cut the stem between the new plant and the mother.  Rosemary and thyme are actually members of the same family as mint, Lamiaceae!  So are oregano, lavender, sage, hyssop, and more!

In a few weeks I'll have plenty of new mint plants to share!  Try it yourself, it's actually good for the plants to remove a lot of those runners to give the main plant back its container space.  

Oh... one last important tip about mint.  DO NOT TOSS THE UNWANTED RUNNERS INTO THE COMPOST HEAP (unless you want a compost heap-full of mint)!  Rip them up and throw them in the trash.  Not even the green trash, play it safe and throw them in the garbage trash.

(In checking on next week's A-Z posts, I found this one still as a draft.  Since writing I have given away on Craigslist several of the pineapple and citrus basil mints.  Others I planted in a hanging basket, and  I kept the strawberry mint for myself!  The Coyote mint had a bad reaction to some "organic" and "safe" aphid killer, and is looking a bit worse for wear.  More about that later.)