Saturday, 20 May 2017

In Mint Condition

A couple of weeks ago I was taking mint cuttings and ended up with some trimmings consisting of 2 leaves and an inch of stem. Not much to go on, but rather than discard these I balance them by their leaves across a jam jar of water on the kitchen windowsill so that the bottom of the stalk was submerged.  Here's what happened


and here's another that is a week older.


The reason I happened to have a jam jar of water on the windowsill was because I was trying out a system for taking basil cuttings and rooting them in water.  While slower than mint the basil went on to develop dramatic roots too:






I will now be potting these up.  The basil I have sown at the same time is minuscule so I think this method for generating successional cropping will be very useful for basil.

For mint it just proves how vigorous mint is!  If you plant roots it will grow leaves and if you soak leaves/stem it will develop roots!

If you would like  to read more about mint cuttings and how they fare why not visit Darren's  blog at Darren's Mint


Peppermint Twist


4 comments:

  1. Did the herbs continue growing when they were potted up?

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  2. Well I am only potting these ones up today, but some basil that was potted up a week ago (with only a couple of weeks root growth) is thriving. I will update in a few weeks.

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  3. I so wish I had thought about doing this, I have just paid £4 for two little plants! Still I will propagate them this way when they are bigger for more plants xxx

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  4. It's amazing how many plants will produce rooted cuttings in just water. There's a shrubby herb commonly called 'Mexican mint' that does the same thing quite happily just about every time.

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