08/05/2026
Second peppermint harvest today! Because I have kids and did not get up early and actually made breakfast for them… I got maybe… 1/4 of my peppermint patches harvested before it was too hot to keep working. Better luck tomorrow! 😅😭😂
Ever wondered what it takes to get the herb from the field into your teacup?
We cut a couple inches above the base of the vine, stack it on the sheet, haul it all back to the barn, pick out any weeds or hitchhiking bugs and yellowed/brown/dry/damaged leaves, cut the vines in half, and load them up onto the passive dryer (it’s hot, dry, and windy enough here that’ll do!). In a couple of days we pull them out by the handful, strip the leaves off and rub across a stainless steel screen, and store in a food grade bucket! Then we haul said bucket 2 hours to a commercial kitchen and blend and package teas for you :). Aromatic herbs are my favorite to process - it’s medicine for me just to do the farming and harvesting and processing.
Growing our mints in our food forest makes it more time consuming to harvest (we snip by hand around other plants, shrubs, and trees), but the synergistic system it creates in our orchard is worth it for us. By the way, tarantula hawk wasps love mint flowers!
Oh, I better run out and check my mullein and calendula flowers since they’ll be happy and open and ready to pick now.
Ok, bye!
