an herbal love affair {mint}

One of my favorite herbs to grow and take care of is my mint! Mint is so cooling and refreshing to make drinks with.  I have a few varieties of mint: sweet mint, peppermint, and chocolate mint.  

Here is what my mint looked like the first week of March

These are two separate plants and I was so excited I couldn't stand it!  Here is their progress a few weeks later, the end of March.

A little more grown but still not enough!  I was dying.  I could just taste the mint tea and mojitos I would drink!  I did some moving around with my plants at the beginning of May including repotting some and combining some others.  So now, my mint pots look like this:

It was so full and beautiful.  I clipped a lot of the leaves this past weekend to make a jar of mint simple syrup, a pitcher of mint flavored lemonade, and a few mojitos.  I use the mint simple syrup to sweeten everything.  It was so great!  I also have a lot of peppermint growing, I think I will use that on my chickens.  I saw a blog post on how to freeze the peppermint in water to give a treat to chickens.

This is my peppermint in my pallet herb garden.  More on that later!

Mint Simple Syrup
Ingredients: 1 cup water, 1 cup sugar, handful of mint leaves
Directions: in a sauce pan over the stove, mix together the water and sugar. bring to a boil.  turn heat off and continue to stir the water and sugar letting it dissolve.  add your mint leaves and allow to steep for an hour.  Store in an airtight container in your refrigerator.  Use as a sweetener with drinks.