Confine-mint (ha?)
How to Control Mint
Mint of all varieties is two things: great to have around and extremely invasive.
Want my advice? If you haven’t already planted mint in your garden: just don’t. It WILL try to take over. Plant it in a pot…and put the pot on concrete away from your gardens so that it can’t spread it’s roots out the drainage hole. I have also read about people planting mint in 5 gallon buckets with drainage holes and sinking those into the garden. Maybe that works; sounds a big risky to me.
We have a lovely variety of mint that seems to have been planted on the left side of the yard but which has spread into a HUGE mass. We also find mint in every other part of the yard. Apparently it can even jump sidewalks. For the moment I am not going to remove it all; I am willing to try, at least for a while, to keep it confined. It goes into the raspberries where it becomes their competition and at some point I think we’ll stop wanting to keep up with that.
For now, here is my plan: to keep it confined I bought 14-inch aluminum sheeting in a 50-foot roll. You can find this in the roofing section of your local hardware store. Sink this into the ground around the bed where you want to confine your mint. We’re doing the same thing around the tansy which is also very invasive.
From what I’ve read this is sometimes enough…but depending on how favorable your soil and climate are to mint it may slow but not stop the spread. I will update on the success this technique is for us sometime in the future.
1/4 of what we started with
I took an old bird bath stand, flipped it upside down, and buried it leaving about 4 inches sticking out of the ground. It ends up looking like a pot, only its tapering the roots about 2.5 feet under ground. I put the mint inside that and it hasn’t escaped in 2 years.
BUT, we also put a small bit near the compost pile, to help battle the smell. That little bit has pretty much overgrown the whole area. I will be spending a lot of time fighting it back over the years, but it smells lovely.
Nice! & a good use for an old birdbath…I think we have one of those lying around our yard — we’ll have to use your technique when we get around to putting in another variety of mint…or if we decide to tear out all of what we’ve got and re-plant some of it in a controlled environment.