Sometimes life gets busy and things like dates for seed starts pass you by. This spring was one of those years but gardening with my kids is a priority for me so we chose some things like sugar snap peas that are tasty, quick to grow to maturity, easy to grow, and very forgiving of small children who forget to water them some days. Do yourself a favour and start with good seeds. Cheap grocery store seeds often have low germination rates and they may frustrate you and make you think you can’t grow things. I love Territorial Seeds, their affiliated West Coast Seeds, Sandhill Preservation, and Seeds of Change, just to name a few goodies. They all have great seeds, don’t sell GMO’s, and have lots of heritage varieties.
We also started some mint plants from cut mint stems that we picked up for $1.29 a bunch at the grocery store. Mint is a vigorous, some would say invasively aggressive, plant which makes it challenging for gardeners who forget to isolate it, but perfect for busy families who need a tough as nails herb to grow.
We took the freshest looking stems, cut the ends off, and put them in a glass of water. New roots and leaves are only going to grow out of the nodes on the stem so try to have one near the bottom as you won’t get rooting unless you have at least one node in the water. (nodes are the “joints” between sections of the stem) Start more than you want; we got three good plants out of five started stems.
We then put a plastic bag “tent” over the leaves and the cup so that it would be really humid around the leaves. This is important because the plant has no roots and can’t support those leaves. They may all fall off during the rooting process. This is ok.
For the next week or two, just put the glass somewhere that it isn’t going to be directly in the sunlight or it will get too hot. Make sure that there is always about the same level of water in the jar, and remove dead leaves if they fall in the water. After about ten days, our stems had roots like this.
The next step was to plant the stems in potting soil. You need to use potting soil unless you are planting these in the garden. This is because regular garden soil in a pot will become like concrete in a very short time when it is used in a container. If you do plant your mint directly in your garden,be forewarned that it may spread and take over. The containers don’t need to be anything exalted; we used an empty yogurt container and an empty strawberry container. The strawberry container was better because it had built in drainage holes. Poke or cut some holes in the bottom if your chosen container has none.
We kept the starts well watered for a couple of weeks.
Then we planted them in a big pot to live on the deck in the sun.
And after two months, the peas are blooming!
