Mint Harvest

Mint is one of the easiest and most useful plants you can grow. There are so many things you can do with mint. You can use it in cooking to give a new flavor to dishes, make cooling teas from it, use it to repel mosquitoes*, let it grow around windows and doors and foundations to repel insects, make jelly, make syrup, put it in your bathwater, etc. It is useful as a medicine and helps irritable bowel and other digestive orders, is very nutritious, helps bad breath, is anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, and antifungal, can relieve headaches, etc. I could go on and on about mint much like Bubba and shrimp in Forrest Gump. I have propagated mint to grow in several different places on our farm. There was some already on the farm when we moved here 25 years ago.

We just harvested a little of ours to use in three different ways.

We are drying the leaves to make tea. Sometimes we add it to our regular tea to add a body wide cooling effect. When we make plain mint tea, we sweeten it with honey.

Here Em is crushing mint to release the oils. We add water and slowly cook it down to capture the oils. I use this to spray inside of the rabbit cages (but not on the rabbits) to help repel all types of flies. I will also spray this on my clothing before cutting grass, and I will spray it in the house to freshen the air in a room.

This is the left over stems after the leaves were snipped off. We try hard not to let anything go to waste. I sprinkle the leftovers around the inside and outside of animal pens or our home's doors to repel bugs. I also toss some to the animals for them to eat. We toss the "cooked" mint around the cages or our homes' doors too.

*I pick a big handful, crush it, and roll it all over my arms, legs, face, and neck. It has to be reapplied every hour or two depending on how hot it is and how hungry the mosquitoes are. Sometimes it works great, and others it doesn't. I try that and a few other things before spraying chemicals on my clothing to repel mosquitoes. I will use DEET if needed, usually when I am deep into our woods, because Lyme and co-infections are very serious diseases, but I try to keep it off of my skin and apply to clothing only. For those who need it: the nematodes we purchased greatly reduced the garden pests, house flies, fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes too. We applied them two years in a row and saw a reduction each year. We can tell the nematodes numbers have increased, and they are still working hard for us. I have seen one flea and two mosquitoes..and I am outside a lot. We've had very, very little pest damage on our vegetable plants too. Now, we just need to buy some every couple of years or so to maintain. I strongly recommend them for everyone with a yard!