it's the end of June and it's time to
harvest our first cutting of peppermint
one of the great things about having a
garden is being able to save really
great food for the winter when
everything else is just so expensive and
so dear this peppermint is planted over
here on this side of the pond to keep it
away from the other mints that I have
planted the chocolate mint the spearm
mint the catnip
because the mints when if they mix will
become less pungent and you won't get
that great peppermint
smell so I'm here just cutting
off the peppermint it's been growing all
spring I managed to get this heirloom
variety couple of years ago from an old
friend but if you ever want to plant
peppermint just plant it in a moist spot
it'll grow year after year try to keep
it away from the other pep mints and
you'll be fine doesn't need any
fertilizer uh it just keeps growing and
growing brought the mint in from the
garden it's nice and fresh now and you
can always tell mint it's very easy to
identify First by the smell you just
smell it smells just like Altoids or U
some kind of peppermint gum uh the Lea
leaves are always very distinctive
they're always growing out of the stem
and they grow opposite each other right
out of the same place on the stem and
the stem itself is square and that's
what's unique about mint plants there're
about 160 varieties of mint that are uh
wild all over the United States but only
a few of them are really good but they
all have square stems and their leaves
all grow opposite each other if they
grow alternate it's not mint so don't
eat it what we do with mint is we uh use
it in a variety of ways we'll put it in
ice water and it's really nice to have
during the day it's a refreshing pickme
up um during the uh winter if we uh have
a stomach ache or something like that or
we'll just make some mint tea and mint
tea helps with stomach aches if you get
recurring stomach aches be sure to go
see a doctor
but if you just have the uh too full I
just ate too much kind of a stomach ache
uh try some mint tea it's um really uh
good and it's very healthy and because
it's from my organic garden I know
exactly what's in it now we have our
work surface here today and I prepared
it by spraying
it with Clorox cleanup and you always
want to be really scrupulous about your
cleaning and your preparation when
you're working with any kind of food
that way you don't run into any problems
like E coli or
salmonella now the process that I use to
dry the herbs is based on something I
developed just for this particular
situation in our home which is that we
have a dehumidifier in the basement and
it's always going now with herbs you
want to dry herbs out of the Sun and out
of the light and the reason for that is
light really degrades the taste of an
herb because it evaporates off the oils
and the chemicals which make it make the
good flavor in peppermint and other
herbs like basil thyme which we also
dry so what I do is I just take
a um shopping bag which in this case uh
you know we got from Trader
Joe's and
I like the Trader Joe's bags because
they have a handle on them and that way
in the basement I can just put the bag
up on a nail on one of the rafters and
what I do is I cut little triangles out
of the corner of the
bag and the reason I'm doing this is
because we want ventilation while the
herb is
drying and what the ventilation will do
is it will prevent prent mold from
forming on the leaves which are still
damp so I'm just cutting out all these
triangles this is a good way to recycle
your bags also and reuse
them um so the the bag looks like
this and when we open it you can see
that there's going to be a lot of
ventilation there now we just take the
herb throw it in the bag try not to get
the little triangles in
there and now we have a loose bag of
peppermint and what we're going to do is
just staple the top so that no dust gets
in and I'm going to mark it
peppermint
June
2008 I get my U there better and that
way later on in the winter when we go to
take the dried peppermint and further
process it for putting it into the
cupboard we'll know exactly when we took
it and when it was when it was dried
so what I've done is I've prepared uh a
bag of th that has already gone through
the
process
and this is a bag of time that I put uh
in the basement a couple of years
ago and all you do is you dump it out
onto your clean surface
and smells like
pizza it's
great great
stuff take out any of the branches that
you
can time doesn't have thick branches but
you don't want to get those into the um
pizza or whatever you're preparing for
food with the
th it smells so good right now I really
wish you could smell
it and we grow this uh time right out
here it's another perennial it comes
back every
year and it is so far
better than anything that uh you can buy
and youve got the satisfaction of
knowing you've grown it yourself you
know exactly where it comes from and uh
that's it so here is um time and what
I'll do is I'll put that into a mason
jar a glass mason jar you can get mason
jars at the the supermarket uh they
carry them in the summer where people
want to U Can food and the only thing
you got to do is just make sure that
it's really
dry and otherwise it'll mold inside the
uh canning jar and there you have it now
this winter whenever we're going to cook
something up a stew or fish or something
like that uh we'll just reach into the
canning jar and we'll have some nice
fragrant time from the garden