Moving and Removing Mint

Last summer, one of the first things we planted in the newly completed garden was mint. It was a freebie salvaged from the back yard before the Bobcat came in, and I rather cavalierly just tossed the few small bits in the bed without much thought. In the past I had managed to kill mint that I planted, so I wasn't too worried about all that I heard about it being incredibly invasive.

Well. Eight months after we planted it, that mint was everywhere. We were going to move it anyway, now that all the herbs are being moved to the back of the garden. Today when we went to dig some up to move it, this is what we ended up with:

That is a five-gallon bucket stuffed to overflowing with mint roots--the big runners that reach everywhere and send up new shoots all over the place. And this is only the first of two buckets that we ended up with, all from a 4x8 foot bed. 

I think we got just about all of it out as we turned the soil to amend it for the spring planting. We decided against dumping those very strong roots into the compost pile, and instead Kirk threw them over the fence into the woods at the back of the property. If it manages to naturalize back there, fine.

Having learned my lesson, I put a very small piece of root into pots this time when I transplanted the mint to its new home:

If you look very closely, you can see the tiny new shoots. The pots are buried in the raised bed, and should keep the roots from spreading the way they did before. I have a feeling I will always be annoyed when the edges of those plastic pots show through the soil after a hard rain, but that minor aesthetic glitch is better than having to chop out gallons of runaway mint ever again.

Other herbs that got transplanted today along with the mint were chives, tarragon, sage, and marjoram. The chives and tarragon have broken dormancy and look great — so strong that I was able to split them in half (remember, we have two beds of herbs that form a mirror image of each other). The sage looks decent, though not big enough to divide. The marjoram seems dead. I moved it anyway in hopes that it is just a literal late bloomer, but I'm not holding my breath.