How to Grow Peppermint
This article is part of our “How to Grow Herbs” series. If you would like to learn more about how to work with this plant after you harvest it, please refer to our Herbal Aromatherapy Certification Program™ here.
Peppermint is so easy to grow that it might be harder to get it to stop growing in your space than it is to get it to thrive.
Peppermint is a perennial plant (it comes back year after year in areas where it is hardy) in the Lamiaceae or mint family. It is so abundant and enthusiastic and generous in the way it grows that it will happily (some would say aggressively) spread throughout the whole garden if you let it. I have seen two tiny rooted cuttings take over a 6 foot by 3 foot raised bed in just one growing season, happily spilling over the sides and sending runners underground to other areas of the garden. Plant peppermint in a container or in a raised bed to contain it, regularly harvest from it and keep the edges of the beds trimmed to keep the patch tidy.
As with most other Lamiaceae family plants, trimming peppermint or pinching out its center tips will encourage the plant to continue to fill out and grow larger. To do this, snip just above a leaf node when you harvest or prune. You can pinch center growth every week or two throughout the season for a continual supply of fresh mint leaves or you can trim the whole plant back 6-10″ above the ground (cut just above a node) several times throughout the season for a more substantial harvest for drying, tincturing, or distilling.
Peppermint Spreads!
Peppermint spreads through underground runners and through its seeds. The runners make it an easy plant to share with other gardeners because they are so easy to root to create new plants. Just stick a little clay pot with some soil under a runner with a root node, wait for it to root into the pot, then snip it from the parent plant and you have a new cloned peppermint plant to share with someone else! You can also just uproot some of the rooted runners, snip them between nodes, and pot those up to share. This is such a hardy and resilient plant that it is not too picky about how you propagate it via runners. You can propagate them just about any time of year.
Pruning
After the first frost arrives and the plants start to die back, cut the remaining aerial growth back to the ground. Mulch the plants well if you live in a place with cold winters. The plants will return with fresh growth in the spring when the soil warms up if you live in a USDA zone 3 or higher.
I prefer to cut my plants back a little earlier, after they start flowering, to keep them from scattering seeds. I’ll leave flowers for pollinators while they are looking fresh, but once they start to fade, I cut the flower spikes off.
Grow from Cuttings, Not Seeds
If you want true peppermint in your garden, you will need to start with rooted cuttings (rooted runners). While peppermint does produce viable seed, its seeds are not true to the parent plant because mints readily cross pollinate. Seed-grown mint may produce tasty new mint varieties or may end up being what we often call “stinky mint” – a nasty tasting mint that will forever be difficult to eradicate from your garden once it takes root and starts spreading. If you want to try to discover a new variety of mint, that is when you would want to play with germinating peppermint seeds – just keep each seedling in its own pot (with a tray or saucer underneath to keep the roots from going through the drainage hole) for its first year or two and do not plant them out into your garden until you are sure you have a variety you want to continue growing.
Growth Requirements
Plant peppermint and other mints in well-draining, deep, rich soils and keep them evenly watered throughout the season. Harvest just as the plants begin to flower if you are going to dry it for the apothecary, tincture it, or distill it, as this is when the plants have the highest essential oil content. Harvest any time throughout the growing season for cooking, beverages, or fresh leaf teas.
The plants benefit from being divided and thinned every 1-3 years, as they can become quite crowded in their beds.
Learning More
If you would like to learn more about how to work with aromatic plants, I hope you will join me in our Herbal Aromatherapy Certification Program™ here at Floranella! In it, I teach students how to safely and effectively work with over 100 different herbs as well as their applicable essential oils and hydrosols from the garden to the still to the apothecary. I hope to see you in class one day!
About the Author
Hi there, I’m Erin! I am the main instructor here at Floranella. I am a clinical herbalist, aromatherapist, artisan distiller and organic gardener based in the Pacific Northwest. Here at Floranella, I teach people how to work with plants safely and effectively from the garden to the apothecary. Thanks for being here! I’m glad you stopped by.
