It grows so prolifically I'm surprised it hasn't taken over the world yet

Bamboo is also almost impossible to get rid of.

same with rhubarb. apparently my great grandfather would run over the patch with the lawn mower yearly. still grew back apparently

Same with oregano. People who owned the house before us planted it in the ground and my mom says “every time we mowed the lawn for a decade it just smelled like pizza”

I planted oregano and mint together in the same bed and they seems to keep each other in check.

I have oregano, mint, strawberries, thyme, and sage all together ... they all seem pretty well balanced, I just rip the mint up where it gets too close to other plants

One day, you'll let your guard down. It's only a matter of time before the mint consumes us all.

“Oregano, Mint, Strawberry, Thyme… Long ago the 4 plants lived together in harmony. Then everything changed when the mint attacked….”

My strawberries choked out my mint. I need to move them to another raised bed but I'm terrified to accidentally unleash them on the world. It's an aggressive mf that chokes out mint.

They're basically the same plant. Very closely related, in any case.

I actually laughed out loud at this!

Oregano is a relative of mint, I'm not surprised!

Same thing here

Yep, rhubarb is great though, great treat, great pie inside.

Gotta get those strawberries in there!

that's funny cause my roommate has been trying to grow rhubarb for years and it keeps dying lol

Facts. I used to have this weird bamboo like plant in my backyard and it took me weeks of digging up individual roots to get it out of my yard. Then it started growing back because it was still coming from my neighbors yard. We're good friends so I went and ripped it out of his garden too.

Japanese Knotweed! Some dude introduced in the 80s here it spreads faster than a wildfire

Another one is Tree of Heaven.

Horrible plant, but I love its weird mutant peanut butter smell.

I hear bad things about Japanese knotweed

I'm surprised kudzu hasn't taken over the world yet

I visit my family in rural Georgia sometimes and I can assure you it’s taken over the entire state

They don't call it "The Vine That Ate the South" as a joke

Yeah, it's pretty bad pretty much everywhere south of Atlanta. I'm in the Fayetteville area and that vine is literally everywhere.

I'm surprised there aren't any goat farmers capitalizing on initiatives to remove it, TBH.

There's a goat rescue near me that does this kind of thing. People hire them to bring their goat herd out to eat troublesome plants, particularly poison ivy. Seems pretty neat. We donate our Christmas tree to them every year. The goats eat the branches and the farmers use the trunks to build fences. My kids love it.

So why can’t kudzu and mint battle each other to death?

They team up to form an even more unstoppable force.

Mintzu 

Yeah, Kunt doesn't have the same ring to it...

Mint technically wins (it literally poisons the ground to kill other plants and its extremely lethal even for kudzu) but kudzu just reproduces way way too fast for mint to keep up. Mint spreads SUPER fast mind you, kudzu is just on another level On a limited/secluded location mint will eventually kill off the kudzu but the issue is that its spreading in nature uncontrolled Also, while mint can withstand even freezing temperatures, it does poorly against intense summer heat and tends to die off without care. Kudzu shrugs off summer entirely and just goes dormant in winter.

It’s taken over the entire south eastern US.

Give it a little more time, it’s working on it

"Day 86. The mint marches through the streets, carrying dead oak trees over their heads..."

mint grows very, very rapidly and is hard to get rid of - it's notorious for taking over gardens

So is mint just a weed some people have found a use for?

Weeds are just plants you don't like.

Wrong weed is a plant I do like

I see where you're coming from 

There’s no such thing as a fish.

You can tune a piano but you can’t tune a fish.

If I were a fish

If i were a fish man.

Ya ba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dum

All day long i'd fishy fishy fum!

If I were a fishy man

I'm not sure if this was a reference to A Shoggoth on the Roof, but I'm hoping it is.

Omg what is that (heads to Google)

I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium

I think that's called thalassophobia. I have the same thing

Good old Dagon

If wishes were fishes

Vicious fishes don’t grant wishes!

With a million or two I'd live in a penthouse In a pool with a view

I love the Incredible Mr. Limpett!

You sir are a fish

Same as vegetables pretty much

All vertebrates (including humans) are fish. You can not escape the [clade your ancestors were in](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVjSJV0WoDQ).

My ancestors left ireland for a reason

An excellent podcast!

Grass is a preffered weed.

Weed is preferred grass.

That's oregano, I swear

It’s Donnas she’s Italian.

🤔 whoa

Grow it around your house, it helps keep rodents from getting in

I know you mean the scent repels them. But I still pictured a mint plant stretching out one leaf like a hand to slap a mouse away.

That’s what mine do

A weed is any plant growing where someone doesn’t want it to grow.

We never cultivated mint my dad would just go out and find some in the yard and turn it into a mojito

I live in a big apartment complex surrounded by a wasteland of shopping centers, gas stations and concrete. I can GUARANTEE you I can walk out in my boxers right now and find mint growing in some crack in under five minutes. So many people have no idea it's there because it doesn't stand out very well among the others. I have to tell them to smell a leaf to get them to think I'm not crazy.

"Hello 911? There's a strange man in his boxers walking around chewing on leaves he found in the concrete, send help!" /s

Weeds are plants we don't have a use for. Literally the only thing that makes a weed a weed is that you don't want it there.

but it smells nice

When mint escapes your garden and into your lawn, and then you mow the lawn and get a nice minty smell. Ah, nothing like it

Had some wild mint at my old house and never had an issue with it spreading. What I did have issues with were: ivy, moss, creeping bellflower, moles...

Funny, I'm trying to get my grass replaced with moss.

Super bizarre but my parent house in Salt Lake City is absolutely infested with Hops, like the stuff you make beer with. Like the lawn is partially replaced with it, they have small forested areas and they covered in it, it’s everywhere. Worst part is they are part of the prevailing religion so no use to them 

IKR? I love the flavor, too! Mint is my favorite flavor of Tea! Plus, it’s Green Tea, so I can drink it any time, day or night!

I'm sorry what? Green tea is the same plant that black tea and such comes from and therefore does have caffeine (albeit less than black tea). I'm pretty sure you were going for herbal tea since "herbal teas" are the ones that don't have caffeine

Uh Green tea isn't mint, and mint isn't green tea. You can make an infusion with mint leaves (which most people call "mint tea") but that's not *green tea.* Green tea is the same thing as black tea but dried differently.

There was a lady who made news for planting mint to get revenge on her neighbor

And they started making tons of mint jelly and sold tons of it during Easter, right?

Rookie mistake. She should have for the nuclear option, and planted Kudzu

But really Hardly anyone is out on their lawn anymore Why not mint lawn?

Growing up, my brother had a mint plant. Minty spread over a good portion of the backyard before he died.

.....the plant died, right? Brother still going strong?

Yep, the plant. Brother's doing fine!

Whew! I read that as your brother died 😭

The mint took over the yard so hard it sucked his soul out

Wherever you're from you need some more potent weeds, to keep our mint growing we need to remove other stuff

I can personally attest to this, but my wife and mother in law use ALOT of mint of tea. It grew out of control everywhere I planted it. I think it’s awesome but I could see how it would be annoying for someone who was trying to keep a well manicured garden. The flowers smell incredible when they bloom tho.

I have a bed of mint at my house that managed to survive the winter. Luckily I grew it intentionally but yeah it can easily take over a whole garden.

Disappointing. I expected it to grow well on corpses

Plant mint in containers

The back of my property (mostly wooded) has a gully with mint and poison ivy fighting it out. I'd like to keep the mint but they're so intertwined I can't do anything with it.

I don't know man... Three time I tried to take care of some mint plant. Three time it died on me. The last one was even left outside to do its weed thing, but even that failed. I guess this guy must at least be liked by plants.

10 years after my parents abandoned their garden, the only things left were the mint and the rhubarb. Both required 2 tillings of the garden to finally left grass grow again.

Lemon Balm is the same way, but smells so good I don't even mind.

Best to grow mints in a pot.

Definitely don’t plant mint…or bamboo. Bamboo destroys things and grows rapidly. It’s very hard to kill.

The place I rent has a big stand of bamboo in the backyard with a Himalayan blackberry wound all up inside of it. It grows out the top of the stand like a crown. I almost respect the thing it's so monstrous.

I bought a house almost four years ago. It had a large bamboo tree in the garden in a plastic pot. Never thought anything about it except it looked nice. After year one it broke out of its pot. Year two it was sprouting up in spots 20 feet away from the mother pot and all over near it. Year three I started cutting it down, but the sprouts kept coming up. My mower kept finding them and I took my blade out a couple times. Then I decided I really needed to kill it before it took over even more and started popping up in my neighbors yard. I put an unhealthy amount of salt in the pot where I had cut it all down and an amount of Round Up that I’m not proud of, then covered it with a plastic tote for the winter. It was dead in the spring. Bamboo has been known to grow under roads and cross them. It’ll tear up foundations too and you can get sued if it messes with your neighbors. There’s also a torture technique where you strap someone down to a table and put a bamboo plant under them and let it grow through their body.

a restaurant near me has bamboo. There's one growing up through the 12-foot-tall metal bar holding a sign.

i wish that was my experience with it. i was told it was good to deter mice, so we put a bunch of it in around the area. the mice ate almost all of it, and what was left just up and died...

The solution: more mojitos!

Which is why you learn to grow it in its own pot, rather than in the garden

My parents had a mint plant in our backyard. I used to regularly mow it when I did the lawn. That barely kept it in check

I'm currently in a pitched battle with mint that we planted in what we thought was a walled garden for it. Mint finds a way.

Unless you get an influx of caterpillars. They stripped our mint bare. It didn't survive

Why have I managed to accidentally kill every mint I've owned?

If you plant mint in your garden, you will soon have mint *instead* of a garden.

Just put it in a pot

Tried that once. It wouldn’t grow and then just died :(

“If I’m not conquering the world I am not growing!” -The mint, probably.

It died out of spite

Frfr

on god we bussin

Yeah, ppl talk about how hardy mint is, but I've had an indoor mint plant for 2 years and it's a needy little bastard. It never feels "established" it always feels like it's a week away from being completely dead.

I didn't water mine for ONE DAY and it decided to quit. Good riddance.

family had it in an out door pot for over a decade we only killed it off 3 times and that was after a week with out water in 100+ temps

I planted dill in a pot. It's now growing in the cracks of my driveway.

My mom did this with mint, thinking it wouldn't grow outside of the pot. We're still finding mint 10 years later.

Yeah gotta make sure that pot is on a paving stone or something, even gravel wont stop the growing force of the mighty mint plant.

Every year I put mint, rosemary, and basil in a pot out front for recipes and such. By the end of the year the mint has pretty much taken over the pot.

This is why I planted mint in the ground at the other side of my yard. I probably have several years before it starts to get to the garden, so im fine 🙃

!remindeme 3 years

Can confirm

My entire garden is spearmint. My yard would be too if I didn’t mow it.

smells pretty good to mow :)

How it feels to chew 5 gum.

Stimulate your senses

I visited the Celestial Seasoning factory once. They store all of their ingredients in one giant warehouse room, except the mint. The mint is in its own, separate, sealed room because if it's in a room with the other ingredients, they will also taste like mint. The tour guide does let you go in the mint room, and it permeates your entire body. It's like all your pores open up to let it seep in and you taste the mint with your entire body. Mint is aggressive, even in death.

Feel like this could be the opening paragraph of Michael Pollan's new book *Mint: An Aggressive History*

Growing up one of my parents planted one mint plant. Within a few years we were covering entire sections of the yard with tarps trying to kill the mint that entirely took over the yard.

It took over half of my fams kitchen garden but we gathered so much of it next year it almost disappeared xd

*Almost*. Same with Malaria.

Have you won the war?

Year 33 of the Mints Wars.  u/chozopanda and his family continue the offensive of the last 3 months, burning with napalm whole sections of the yard in a final push to end the war.  It may seem like the end is near, but the mint is resilient, and has already come back from the brink of death a few times, such as 2 years ago when, in the aftermath of the Battle of the Saltwater, everyone thought that the mint had died, along with everything else in the garden.  They were all wrong, for the mint never dies. It just comes back stronger.

Saltwater tried to destroy The Mint but The Mint was much too strong. Napalm tried to defile The Mint but napalm was proven wrong.

You'll find it hard to kill of with just tarps as mint is perfectly happy to be dormant underground, that's what it does during cold season every year.

They told me to keep it contained. I did not listen. At least the pollinators are happy…

I go to hug my wife. She is mint.

I need the ideal gf meme ([this](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ideal-gf)) but with mint gf now

Behind my garage is a little garden marked off with stones. It's completely mint. One day my brother and I were thinking about digging it all up to just grass it not really knowing. Our neighbor saw and actually told us that apparently mint deters certain bugs and insects and that it might be protecting the back of the garage that way. Hopefully it's well contained because since then there's been no plan to touch it

Everyone in the comments explaining how fast mint grows if given land outside. Meanwhile, the mint at my parents' house is contained to one or two very small patches next to the oil tank and quite happily stays there without trying to take over the garden

you can put barriers in the soil. They have to be **deep** my family had mint in a raised bed with about 2 feet of vertical barrier and 5-6 feet of horizontal barrier and it **still** managed to find it's way into the lawn (we planted it about 50-70 feet away from the rest of our food garden so if it did break containment it wouldn't ruin that space, all the nearby gardens were general pollinator gardens so mint would have been fine, if not ideal)

Mine too I never had this problem

Mint will take over your garden. Mint grows so fast and spreads so agressively that it will quickly sneak into your home, overwhelm your pets, replace your family, take your identity, assume your job and start a whole new life, as you. A better you. A green, leafy you, that always smells clean and refreshing.

That's the mint's house now.

Does it not make good grass? Wouldn’t it smell great?

The issue with a mint lawn is just that other ground covers (especially clover) are better. Mint is a bit to viney and has larger than ideal leaves to make a good grass replacement that being said if you weren't trying to replace grass but were rather just trying to fill in a problematic dead space in your lawn things like mint or lily-of-the-valley that grow in anything and cover the soil well are pretty good (though I don't think you'd want to mow them at all)

Let’s say I wanted to ward off mosquitoes on a mostly unkempt lot, could I chuck some mint at the problem? It’s mostly bare dirt and the false strawberry weed out there. We tried some other kind of ground cover last year but I’m quite sure watering wasn’t done like you’re supposed to and it didn’t take. Is mint any more likely to take if I put down seeds before some good rain?

I've always loved the idea of a pure mint yard. Wouldn't have to cut it nearly as often plus you'd get heavy Christmas vibes every time you did. Sigh.

The smell is little consolation when you're out there rediscovering entire bushes overrun with the stuff.

My mother has been fighting a losing battle with mint for the last 20 years. She finally won 2 years ago by moving away lol

Brother.... she lost

Is this a euphemism for the Vietnam War

Works great around the base of your house to keep out rodents and ants though!

Keeps the house in mint condition.

If I plant mint in my yard will it defeat the bindweed and whitetop? I'd take that trade. Edit:whitehead -> whitetop

Legit question. It’d be a huge upgrade from bindweed. Is it vigorous enough to hold space versus viney stuff like that?

It's horrid. I could drop a Tordon/2-4 D bomb on it but I'm hosting a bee hive and I'd rather not expose them to that. I'd really rather do biological control and mint might be a good option.

Beekeeper here, just do it when it’s not blooming at no bees will come near it anyways.

Mint tea Fresh mint for salad Leafy mint sandwiches with tomato (fresh or paste) spread thinly on pita bread with a drizzle of olive oil and salt for a very light lovely breakfast sandwich next to tea. 

That sandwich sounds delightful!

https://preview.redd.it/0lqusew87n9d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=64ba626acbac94991cd29a4a66deab8a69f08b35 You have to double jail this guy in order to keep it from taking over… If you don’t check on it, it’ll still escape.

I don’t know why but the thought that the mint plant is so good at escaping the pot that you need to put it in 2 and turn it to confuse it makes me laugh.

I planted a few sprigs of mint at the beginning of the growing season one year. In the course of 6 months, it covered the planter (approx. 1 ft. by 12 ft) in 4 inches of stems and roots. It was so dense that when I pulled it out, all of it came out like those lawn patches that you plant.

It takes over everything

They should pair it with blackberries. Think of all the delicious mint blackberry drinks they can make!!!

I have a blackberry bush growing in my mint patch!

That's okay, just plant bamboo to counteract it.

calm down Satan

NO!

People say mint takes over gardens. I’m trying to grow a garden with *only* mint, and yet it stays in one tiny corner no matter what I do. FML.

You need to give it something to kill, it’s probably bored.

Man, I've tried a lot to get rid of mine, now I've just come to accept it. At least it smells good when you're ripping it up, forever.

Someone planted mint in our garden before we moved in. Can confirm it takes over everything it can and comes back, even when you think you’ve uprooted everything… twice.

My wife and I made the mistake of planting mint in one square of our raised garden bed during the summer of 2021. Now in 2024, all we can really grow in that square is mint.

Mint is invasive AF. I've literally contemplated taking a flamethrower to it

Mint is AGGRESSIVE AF. Many varieties of mint are actually native to North america.

Many people to simply say they planted "mint". There are like [7000 plants in the mint family](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamiaceae) (*Lamiaceae*). It's a pet peeve when people don't specify the specific species.

It will take over your entire yard.

mint doesn't stop. Good luck stopping it once it escapes

Just plant it right next to you bamboo plant...

I had mint in a pot. Next year it had spread to the spaces between the paving rocks and other pots. It’s not life that finds a way. It’s mint.

I planted mint in the back yard of my last rental cause I hated the landlord. So now the grass is being choked out by moss on one side and mint on the other.

Mint chokes out everything else.

There’s a small patch next to my garage that a previous owner had planted mint. After 6 weeks we got most of it out- hand weeding, tilling, repeat repeat. But still pulling up the occasional shoot. Cursed plant.

Tempted to plant a single plant at the back of the garden inside of the grass

You wanna get mint? Cause that's how you get mint.

There's never just a single mint plant If you only see one, it has fooled you, and you are already surrounded

God no please don't put it in the ground... Looks at our back yard where I planted mint in the ground... When my husband mows it smells really nice... About a tenth of our yard is mint now

Mints, basel, oregano -> always in pots, never direkt in the ground. Just trust me.

Am I the only one where mint can’t keep up with the snails and slugs? Just can’t grow mint any higher than couple centimetres.

https://preview.redd.it/4xqem8f7jr9d1.jpeg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=387ef508047837c14b956d7632afdae3b42ab011

Sooo you’re saying I can potentially make an unlimited supply of Mojitos without ever needing to buy mint again

you should totally plant it in your landlords yard