Don't plant mint!!!!!!

Three years ago, I thought it might be a nice idea to have some spearmint near the door so I could garnish iced tea or lemonade with a mint leaf or two.

I started a few seeds in a flat, then planted them out into a flower bed near the garage. That first year I had all the spearmint tea I wanted from fresh spearmint, and I gathered a lot of spearmint and dried it.

Last year it took over the whole flower bed. It was pretty until it started getting too tall and spread into the daylilies, obliterated the little mugho pine, and was competing with the alpine strawberries!

This year, it was awful. The dried stalks were scratching and looked awful. The roots were getting deeper and the plants were getting taller. It was spreading into the lawn.

So this weekend I started digging it up. After watching me struggle to spade up the front half of the flower bed, DH went to the neighbor's and borrowed a backhoe to dig up the rest. When all the dirt was out of the bed except for around the tree roots, I started screening the dirt, to put the dirt back into the bed, but put the spearmint roots, plants, and wild strawberry plants into the compost. It only took about 20 wheelbarrows full.

Talk about a lot of work! Now I know why I didn't choose landscaping as a profession!

I planted cleome, geraniums, verbena, and lobelia in the bed. I took one daylily out of the bed (that's it in the background) and am trying to decide where to put it. I left the hollyhocks in, and some of the daffodils.

It will be interesting to compare the before and after pictures in a few months.

I mentioned to DH that maybe I didn't get quite "all" of the spearmint, because I left the daffodills in place. You should have seen the horrified look on his face!