Invasive Mint is Ruining My Life
Or at least my herb garden. Here's how to deal with the honey badger of herbs.
When we found our house last year, I was tickled pink to discover a lush spiral herb garden blooming in the backyard (what is a spiral herb garden, you ask? Wonderful question — we’ll address this very topic in a future issue). Sage, oregano and rosemary were just a few of the beautiful culinary herbs commingling in the lovely raised brick container that serves as a centerpiece of the space. I of course had to know what the previous owner did to keep said garden looking so gorgeous.
“Nothing!” she told me when we met before Bradley and I moved in, as monarch butterflies snacked on the garden’s greenery. “I just leave it alone. It’s irrigated!” I felt like I had won the landscaping lottery.
You see, herbs marked the start of my own gardening journey at our Rustic Canyon house back in 2024. There’s a white bean dish I first started cooking when we were temporarily living in Austin during the pandemic (the night before Greg Abbott and Ted Cruz’s winter storm left us without power and water for a week, to be exact). And the recipe calls for basil, cilantro and chives soaked in really good olive oil to finish things off. We love these beans. I still make them a lot (I’ll share the recipe one of these days, if you’re interested).
Feeling very over last-minute grocery store runs whenever a last-minute batch of beans came calling, I finally said fuck it and decided to plant my own herbs (doing away with plastic clamshells promptly became one of the great joys of my culinary journey thus far). Soon I had at least a dozen fragrant, edible plants thriving in terra cotta pots of varying sizes on our little back deck. I loved tending my “crops,” as Bradley called them, so much that I was in the midst of sketching out the addition of raised beds when the fires hit in January 2025. Mounds of ash made saving my burgeoning garden impossible. And I vowed to plant a bigger, better herb situation wherever we landed, as soon as I possibly could.
So I’ll repeat, I was pretty excited that we happened to find a house with a professionally designed, irrigated herb palace.
Until I noticed the mint.
Instead of planting this very invasive, fast-growing pest in a container completely separated from the built-in spiral, someone had peppered it among the oregano and nestled it among the sage. Even I — with my ability to kill a houseplant just by giving it the evil eye — knew that mint roots choke out and consume their neighbors. And as such mint must always be quarantined in its own container at all times (unless you have a death wish, of course).
Once we moved in, I sadly managed to murder the sage. The annuals got pulled. Winter came and went. And we had what I thought was a clean slate of onyx-hued soil, with nary a spearmint seedling in sight. But by the end of February — with a force and speed that rivaled Integrity’s re-entry into our atmosphere — a blanket of bright green enveloped the structure, and the yard smelled like mojitos if the wind blew just so.
On March 1st, during the “How to Start a Garden Bed” class at the Meiners Oaks Community Garden (where I had to sign a document promising not to grow mint in the raised bed I was renting), regenerative gardener Morgan Visalli brought up the evil herb. Her suggestion to rid it from your life?
“Turn over the soil.”
Which I thought I did, by pulling out all the sprouting mint and mixing new soil in with the old (I’m also realizing I probably need to do more research on what “turning over soil” actually means).
But now — after I’ve planted new oregano, rosemary, tarragon, tea herbs, sage, cilantro, parsley, dill and three kinds of basil — THE MINT IS COMING BACK. And my herbs look a little sad (this could be due to a variety of reasons. But I feel ok blaming the mint).
Apparently, I’m not alone in this plight.
During a magical visit to the Chef’s Garden at Big Sur’s famed Post Ranch Inn last weekend, Culinary Director Reylon Agustin — who leads the three Michelin Key property’s Sierra Mar restaurant as well as its regenerative farming program — said he’s experienced the same thing.
“Before I even got [to Post Ranch Inn], they had planted a bunch of different patches of mint. And it just went wild.” he said.
“Never put it in the ground!” added Julia Yamasaki, Post Ranch’s edible landscape specialist who oversees the farm day-to-day. “Every time you pull the mint, it actually triggers its growth hormone because it’s rhizomatically spreading. So you have to actually poison it.”
So mint is the rogue chin hair of herbs. I’ve not yet found a great solution for that particular problem either, so I was of course incredibly eager to learn more about Yamasaki’s detailed execution methods for this one.
“Soap and vinegar,” she advised. “And a little bit of salt, if the soil can handle it. The way I’ve kind of successfully poisoned my mint plants out is by soaping them and vinegar.”
Just grab a spray bottle and mix one liter of white vinegar with two tablespoons of salt and one teaspoon of dish soap et voila — your mint-killing concoction is ready to be sprayed on your pesky plants.
If this doesn’t work, I may be forced into the same last-resort measure that Ojai-based herbalist Lauren Snyder had to employ after the mint in her garden couldn’t be stopped.
“Concrete.”
Either that, or rediscover a taste for mojitos.
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I’m pretty sure “Invasive Mint” is the name of a ‘70s prog rock band that opened for Strawberry Alarm Clock.
“mint is the rogue chin hair of herbs”… a classic Erin Weinger-ism! I’m so happy you’re bringing us along on your journey!