 I am Donna. Welcome to my garden. Today I want to talk just a little bit about mint. Mint is a super easy wonderful herb to grow. If you are new to gardening, you can give mint a try. It likes the shade. It likes a lot of different climates. It's useful in a lot of different dishes. I like to use it for tea. I make some sauces with it. I dry it and use it in black and seasoning. I put it in stuffed peppers. There are a lot of different ways. You can use it. I'll put some links at the end of this video for some ideas of how you can use your mint. Right here I'm growing spirumint. There are so many different varieties of mint on the market right now. I call them flavors of mint because there are so many different wines. We have chocolate mint, lime mint, apple mint, pineapple mint, orange mint. I've run a lot of them today. I want to dry some mint for you. I'm going to go ahead and harvest some. I just make a quick note about mint. It is very invasive. If you grow mint, you might want to go ahead and start growing it in a container until you're familiar with how it grows. I've been growing mint for several years. I'm pretty comfortable having it in my garden bed. What you want to look for is if you've accidentally planted it in a bed. The mint vine is going to spread underneath the soil level and you'll notice that it will start to come up probably away from the main plant. You can just pull that up and kind of keep it under control. That's what I've been doing with this. This is spirumint. It so happens to be my favorite mint. It has a really good fresh, real good intense flavor of mint. I could let this grow for a few more weeks. It's still a mile, the weather is still a mile, then it's spring. Right now I really like the flavor of this. I'm going to go ahead and cut it and I'm going to dry some so I'll have it for other uses. Then it will regrow in no time. It grows so well. That's what makes me so nice to grow. I'm going to go ahead and cut it. We're going to dry it. I'm going to dry it in my dehydrator. I've had it for a couple of years. The dehydrator is not something you have to just go run out and get. If you have a garden, I am going to show you how you can also hang it to dry, which is what I did prior to having the dehydrator. Whenever you're harvesting your herbs, always harvest them before they start flowering so you get the best flavor. If you're going to dry them, you probably need to wear gloves or to wash your hands with some really good detergent. Make sure you remove all the oils. We're still going to wash this, but oils can still stick to your hands and they're not going to dry as well. I'm going to put my gloves on. I'm going to snip this off and we are going to take it inside and I'll show you what we can do with it. I'm also going to show you how we can propagate it. It's really easy to propagate. We have a new plant and just a couple of leaks. I washed and dried my mint and now I'm going to show you how you can dehydrate your mint if you don't have a dehydrator. What you'll do is just take your stems here, lay those out and I found that the solid of the bunch is the easier they'll dry. I'm only going to put four stems here. I'm going to take a little bit of juke string. This is very inexpensive string. You've probably bought some of this before. We are just going to tie the bottom. You can double knot that. Make sure that your knot is very tight because as your mint loses moisture, it's going to shrink up and then they can fall out of your knot. I really need to double knot this but since I'm just doing this for demonstration, I'm not going to do that. You want to hang this in a cool dry place. A pantry is wonderful. If you have a little pantry, maybe a closet, something like that. I can hang it in my garage where I live because I'm familiar with the climate. It's not real humid. It's not real hot here. If I still lived in Florida, I could not do that in my garage in Florida because it was so humid there, so hot. It would not have worked out. You want to keep it somewhere dark and cool and dry. It will take several weeks but you will know when it's Friday because the leaves will start falling if you knock it. The leaves will start falling off or something. I think the pantry is a wonderful place to put it. You can hang it upside down like that. In a few weeks, you will have your own dry herbs. Alrighty. Since I'm doing a small quantity, I'm going to move every other tray. I'm going to try to fit all of my mint on about four trays. Alrighty. Three trays. I'm going to put the door on here and I'm going to put this on about 15 hours. You're going to check on it. Okay. It's time to get the mint. I think this dried probably about 18 hours total. I'm going to go ahead and get it out. It's nice and crispy. I'm going to put it right over here on this paper towel. I don't have a whole lot of this only because I'm trying to keep it under control. In my bed, I'm going to move some of this to a container. In the next year, I will have a lot more. Now the time varies as far as how long you are going to need to dehydrate yours. Just check on it. That's what I do. I dry for about 12 hours and I start checking on it. That's what you'll need to do because where you live, it might be a lot more humid than where I live. I don't want to say definitely how long you are going to need to dry yours. Now what I'm going to do is I am going to just put all of this in a large, wide mouth mason jar because I already have some mint that I've dried previously and I'm still using it. Until that's used up, I'm going to store this more for long term use and I'll just store it stem and all in here. When I go to use this, go ahead and show you real quick. I'm going to just tear off the leaves like that and then discard the stem. I don't want to go ahead and do that to all my herbs yet because they're going to keep better, but I'll leave them on their stem like this. Now if you do not have a food saver, which is what I'm going to use to vacuum out the air out of this jar. If you don't have a food saver, you can just put these in a ziplock bag and then use a straw on the side to kind of suck out some of the air. You want to try to keep the oxygen out of anything that you're putting out for a longer term storage because oxygen can break down your food quicker. Oxygen amide. You'll want to store it somewhere where it's kept like in a pantry without much oxygen. I'm going to go ahead and show you how I'll use this accessory. This particular food saver has an accessory hose down here on the bottom. This is what I want you to use to suck the air out of this jar when I'm going to use it for long term storage. I don't need to use the band, just the one that came with the jar. I'm going to use this little attachment. You can get these on eBay. Then I'll plug my little hose into the air and we're going to turn it on. I'm going to press the accessory option and it's going to suck the air right out of the jar. It'll turn off when all the oxygen has been removed. There it goes. Okay. Now my lid is on there secure. I can take this off with like a can opener if I need to. But for now all I'm going to do is go ahead and mark it. And it is May of 2014. All right. Now we're going to give our mint that we've propagated a new home. Okay. So what I have here is just an inexpensive coffee cup that also happened to have this awesome. So I drilled a hole in the bottom with a ceramic bit. And what I'm going to do is put some chipped terracotta pieces down the bottom. You can just use anything. I'm just showing you what I'm using for my container here to get my mint started. It is always very important to put something in the bottom of your containers. If there's not really good drainage and there's obviously not really good drainage here with that one tiny little hole. But so I have some chip clay pieces. You could use pebbles. You can use sand, something like that. And then all I'm going to do is fill this up with some potting soil. The way I like to do that is I like to hold my herbs or the roots. Go ahead and you can pull them apart a little bit. I want to disturb them too bad to do that. And then we're just going to fill it in like this. Now this is just going to be temporary until I start to see some new growth. I will probably see a new little vine come out of the side in a few weeks. This will certainly get much taller but then you'll start to see some new growth come off the side. And at that point I will probably transfer it to a larger container where it can grow. A lot more mint because I'm not going to get a lot of mint in a container this size. The larger your container, the larger your plant obviously. Okay, so I'm going to rinse this off and I'll show you what we have here. Okay, there we have it. I hope you're able to grow your own mint and dry it and everything else. If you have any questions at all, please leave them in the comment section. I'll be more than happy to try to help you. Other viewers may have the same questions that you do. Also, I will leave some links to some recipes and other ways that you can use me at. So thanks so much for watching and have a beautiful day. Bye.