I Wet My Plants

The Mojito mint cuttings I put in water back on May 28th have all rooted! Woohoo!

The roots looked eerie in the water of their popsicle-stick tray:

Time to pot them up and spread the joy of the Mojito mint!  Also, I should divide the 1-gallon pot of Mojito mint into another pot as it has really bushed out.

I must admit that I’ve kind of gone mint crazy this year and have been searching for new and exciting plants.  Two so far have made it into my garden this year: Fruit Sensations and a mystery mint.

I bought the Fruit Sensations mint from Richter’s last weekend:

And the mystery mint came home with me when I was weeding Ottawa Hortiphilia’s flower and veggie beds while she’s been on holiday.  She let me sneak a few cuttings of mint from her garden, a super-stong mint:

Woo! It’s way potent and quite tall for a mint. It’ll be perfect for candying and putting in my iced tea.

Talk about hot and sticky weather! I took a road trip with my sister and nephew down to Brampton this weekend and the humidity was a little unbearable.

On the way back, we stopped off at Richter’s Herbs, the mecca for Canadian herbs. I was pretty excited to check out their plants for sale and entered their stinking-hot greenhouse in anticipation.

Oh man, someone really needed to crack a window in there as I started sweating immediately upon entering. It was too bad as it would have been nice to stay longer but it was just too ridiculously hot and humid. I headed towards the mint section, specifically looking for the New Westerfield hybrid mints, a trademark of mint-crazy Jim Westerfield in Illinois, USA.

Mint does not come true from seed (meaning it may or may not have the same characteristics as the parent plant) and the best way to ensure that you have the right type is to get a cutting or buy a plant. Since I wanted to get a mint that would do well candied in a glass of iced tea or lemonade, I decided to buy a Fruit Sensations mint. At Richter’s, I kept lightly rubbing the leaves to smell the subtle differences between the different plants, however, at some point all the smells got jumbled together. I do have to say that Sweet Pear (one of the first ones I sniffed) didn’t really smell as much like pear as I’d hoped and Jim’s Fruit mint has a real in-your-face minty scent.

I also picked up some Thai basil, Vietnamese coriander, lime balm and Zorba Red oregano, an ornamental. The only thing I regret not looking for was zaatar, a Middle Eastern herb used in hummus.

Of course there were seeds:

and gifts:

We packed up our herb plants, got back in the air-conditioned car and tootled off to the Cottage Gardener!

We happened to catch them on their last day of selling plants to the public. There was a little nursery with all of their plants for sale:

We did a quick tour of their isolation beds, separated by distance and trees to reduce cross-pollination.

Since Sunday was their last day, they were going to plant all of the plants that were left-over from their stand. They also get late frost in their area and were waiting until this week to start planting out into their isolation beds.

Here’s a funny little story:

My dad was one of the founders of the Organic Crop Producers & Processors (OCPP) back when we were growing up. My sister, then a teenager, designed the logo. When I checked the Cottage Gardener’s website for their address on my phone, I noticed they had been certified organic by OCPP so I told them the story about our family and how my sister had created the logo. Well, they were so happy to meet her they gave her a Djena Lee’s Golden Girl tomato plant, an heirloom tomato plant chosen by Slow Food USA as part of its Ark of Taste.  This is the first year that the Cottage Gardener had this variety and it was so new that it wasn’t in the catalogue yet.  So of course, I wanted one too so we bartered and my sister and I did some Inuit throat singing for a Djena Lee for me. I have to say that was the first time I’ve ever throat sang for a plant!

I’ll have a report on the Kemptville Farmer’s Market and Veg Stock as soon as I relax a bit from our whirl-wind trip.

My mojito mint plant is doing super-duper.

It’s doing so well, in fact, that I decided to try my hand at propagating some mint cuttings. I clipped off some of the longer stems, nipped off a couple of the lower leaves and stuck them in a popsicle tray filled with water:

Hopefully, in a couple of weeks, they’ll have enough roots that I can pot them up. So exciting!

I wasn’t sure if the Mojito Mint that I bought from Richter’s Herbs last year would come back despite it being a perennial herb that is hardy in Canadian zones 5 - 9. I had potted it up in a 1 gallon, weed barrier-lined pot and dug it into my vegetable garden to overwinter. Once all the snow had melted off the garden, I started to take pictures. Here it is on April 11:

Not too bad - there are a few green leaves there.

On April 17th:

It’s coming along and has a few more sprigs.

On April 20th:

And here it is as of yesterday:

It looks like it’s going to make a triumphant return and I’m looking forward to harvesting the sprigs to make delicious Mojitos this summer.

Mint is a very invasive plant and, if not given strict orders, will soon get out of control in an open garden. I decided to plant the mint in a 1 gallon pot and then put that into the ground once the cool weather starts.

First, I picked up some Weed Stop Garden Fabric from Canadian Tire. I knew I didn’t need that much so I picked up the smallest package:

I got a 1 gallon pot that I picked up at the last Garden Web plant exchange:

Here’s my slightly-bruised Mojito Mint that really needed to be transplanted:

One bag of organic topsoil which I assumed would be okay for a potted mint:

I cut a strip of the garden fabric, eyeballing it to be able to fit both sides of the pot:

Crammed it into the pot and folded down the edges on the outside of the pot:

And filled it up with the topsoil and dug a hole for the mint:

Stuck the mint in and patted the soil down around the sides:

Then I took a pair of scissors and cut off the excess garden fabric along the sides:

And I was done. It’s now sitting on my deck enjoying the sun in its clearly-defined growing area. Once it starts getting cooler, I will find a nice, protected area to dig the pot into the ground so that it can overwinter and come back next year.