Growing Mint for Flower Farmers: It's Good to be Invasive
Ah, mint.
Mention it to any gardener and you’re going to hear comments that would make you think it’s more akin to some sort of supernatural alien species.
“Be careful, it’s invasive!”
“It will take over your entire garden!”
“I wish I had never planted it!”
Although mint is indeed a vigorous plant that can get out of control if not well-managed, it is still a wonderful garden plant and is one of the smartest crops to grow as a flower farmer and in my opinion get a very unfair and poor rap from the general gardening community.
And yet as a flower farmer, I love it.
Think about it.
What are the qualities you’re looking for in a floral material you’re growing as a crop?
How about a plant that is incredibly vigorous, gives you countless tall straight stems with clean and crisp foliage, has a wonderful scent and texture, can be easily rooted and propagated, and requires no special care or scheduling and is reliably perennial?
I mean, what better qualities could you want from a crop?
There’s also the fact that mint is a perfect foliage to utilize in any arrangement, the soft and scented foliage a perfect companion for all sorts of flowers big and small, and it fills our bouquets, centerpieces, and other arrangements all season long. Floral designers love mint. Retail customers do too. And we love mint too.
our favorite mint varieties
Apple mint
By far our favorite, the fuzzy and circular and soft leaves of apple mint are such a wonderful material to work with. The fluffy circular shapes of the leaves are to die for, such a perfect contrast for other fluffy or vertical-shaped flowers, and there is a very romantic esthetic to apple mint because of that wooly texture.
Apple mint is also the largest growing mint as well, getting large square stems that can be up to three to four feet in length sometimes! One of the only mints that we’ll use in large designs because of its large stature, it’s a fantastic foliage to use in combination with dahlias, pairing well with dinnerplate varieties and pompon shapes as it offsets the smooth and silky petals.
Spearmint
Where apple mint is all soft and wooly and curved, spearmint is glossy, sharp and all angles by comparison. Each leaf is lanceolate in shape with a smooth, shiny texture in a dark green that is perfect for contrasting with both darker and lighter colors.
Spearmint has nice thick stems and is amazingly vigorous, and we cut bucket after bucket from it and it seems to never tire or run out of stems for us to cut. I believe as well with our constant harvesting, this continual coppicing of the plant helps to keep it in check - we’ve never had a problem with it becoming “invasive”.
Also makes the best mint jelly and mojitos as an added side benefit!
Pineapple mint
The white and green variegated coloration of pineapple mint makes it a really fun foliage material to use. Reminding me of a variegated mini-pittosporum, it’s perfect for use with other mints and herbs (especially for those green and white designs) and it looks right at home especially with more “rustic” or “garden” style arrangements.
Due to its variegated nature it’s not quite as vigorous as the other varieties, nor is it as hardy - for some reason we always have issues overwintering it even in Zone 7b - but it is still enough of a delight that we buy new plants every year because it just is that much fun to use in arrangements!
Chocolate mint
Smelling like a York peppermint patty or Andes mint and growing a deep and dark green leaf with streaks of bronze and purple, chocolate mint is a splendid specimen to grow. Vigorous and quick to grow in, it doesn’t get quite as tall as spearmint or apple mint (therefore we use it to a lesser proportion compared to the other two) but is still perfect for short and small designs.
Even better are the flowers that bloom - big dark purple and burgundy spires with the faintest light-lilac colored florets that blossom in rings around the spire, looking like a miniature horsemint bloom or very similar to an Agastache blossom - which makes sense since they are all part of the Lamiaceae family
mint Productivity
Mint is super productive. From just a fifty foot bed we cut hundreds of stems each season, large long-stemmed bunches that are perfect for filling out mixed bouquets and fluffing out bridal bouquets and greening-up centerpieces.
As soon as you cut one stem, another one seemingly pops up in its place - a veritable flower farmer hydra crop that seems to multiply in front of your eyes - and it will keep on producing all the way through December for us.
Without requiring netting or pinching or careful coddling and transplanting, mint will churn out buckets of sweetly-scented foliage all season long with only minimal requirements. I wish every plant were as vigorous as this one!
mint Propagation
One of the easiest plants to propagate, mint is so quick to root you almost don’t even have to try! If you live in a relatively moist and humid part of the country, you can literally just stick stems or roots into the soil and they will form into plants, growing vigorously and quickly.
If you want to create plugs or transplants, you can take cuttings, dip their ends in rooting hormone, place into either pure vermiculite or potting mix and then wait a week or so - after which they will be rooted and ready to be planted out!
It is very possible to establish a large bed of mint from just one gallon-sized plant in just one season as a result of this. And then each year it will keep getting bigger and better. And if you need more, you can always divide or dig up runners from the main plants to multiply your mint plants
Planting Mint
For mint, a good place for it to go would be a semi-moist site with good, fertile soil with lots of organic matter incorporated into it.
Full sun is good, although part shade or even morning-only sun would work. I find that mint generally gets too leggy in full shade, although I have made it work in certain circumstances when I needed an extra bunch or two that had wandered off into shady areas!
Plant mint so that the roots and the crown of the plant are well below the surface. Bury any runners that are coming off the plant - these will form additional plants and sprout from each internode, getting your bed of mint fuller much faster.
growing tips
Mint isn’t difficult to grow at all. Given a decent (average) amount of moisture, precipitation, sun and nutrients, mint will grow well for you with very little care needed at all. Mint can slow down a bit and get some weird curled leaf shapes if deficient in nitrogen - so we make sure that we get ours a good amount of nutrients during the season in the form of a fish emulsion just due to how vigorously it grows, supplementing with a standard 20-20-20 as needed if it really starts slowing down and getting weird.
Just make sure you stay on top of harvesting it - mint can get a little bit raggedy if you let it go for too long, getting bug spots in its leaves and brown spots if left in the sun too long and brown flowers if allowed to go unharvested too long either. We usually like to work our way down a row, mowing down the plants as we go and by the time we get to the end of the row, the beginning of the row is ready to be harvested again.
You may need to net your mint depending on what your growing environment is like (I’ve seen people with 4 foot stems!) to ensure that you have nice and straight pieces to design with. Or, if you prefer more of the natural shape, just let it grow as nature shapes it too - neither way is wrong.
It’s also important every season to ensure that you break up your mint bed to ensure that plants grow from young plants. If you let it grow from the existing plants it usually ends up being very woody and scraggly in its growth habit, so we usually go in with a spade and chop up the existing bed to section up the plants into smaller root sections - which will then root and go on to produce hundreds of new plants within the bed! Incidentally, this also helps to keep mint contained by keeping runners from getting too out of control.
harvesting mint
Mint is pretty easy to harvest. We just cut our stems down as low to the base of the plant as possible to get the longest stem length as well as encourage the greatest stem regrowth later on.
Mint is best harvested when it’s got a bit of woody growth - around July or so here, either right before or right while it is blooming - but you can also cut it earlier so long as you harvest it in cool conditions and get it into water to hydrate right away. Cut with sharp snips, strip the lower leaves and get it into a cool dark place. Careful with apple mint - although its my favorite, it also has the largest leaves and is most prone to flopping, so we only harvest when the stems are very firm and only during the coolest part of the day.
Mint has a great vase life, outlasting most of the other materials in an arrangement and holding up well under even the most challenging of circumstances. Just make sure it’s hydrated before it goes into the arrangement - arranging straight out of the field carries a high risk of floppy stems!
Designing with Mint
Mint is a great filler and foliage plant, occupying a lot of space in our mixed bouquets and centerpiece designs during the season.
When using apple mint due to its furry texture and large leaves and stature, we like to mix it with other fillers and foliage that are different in texture and size and pattern. It pairs well with basil for instance, contrasting well with the glossy sharp leaf shapes but also plays well with fluffy zinnias and dahlias and lisianthus as well.
The smooth leaves of spearmint on the other hand work well with fluffy and airy materials like gypsophila and agrostemma, definitely giving a “from the garden” appearance to any arrangement they are part of.
And for compote designs, we really love those weird, curly, unusually shaped stems of mint that can cascade and curl over the edges of a container - absolutely perfect for adding that touch of interest and movement to an arrangement.
Mint pairs well with other types of mint as well. Using apple mint, spearmint and a variegated pineapple mint works well by giving an arrangement a sense of rhythm and repetition, working cohesively within an arrangement.
there’s So much to like about mint
Whether you’re a fan of how vigorous it is, how prolific it is, how well it combines with other materials, how easy it is to grow, or even the scent, there is so much to appreciate about this (in my opinion at least) unfairly maligned plant when it comes to flower farming.
If you haven’t planted mint for your farm, I’d recommend you plan on it this year. You won’t regret it, I promise.
Are you already growing mint? Let me know in the comments below what your experience has been!
If you’re interested in learning more about growing other herbs and foliages as a flower farmer or for floral design, check out the following posts: