Kitchen Garden Forum

My mints are all grown in one bed and I can still taste the different flavour of each one. Monty Don said this on his programme and it says the same on the RHS website -that they shouldn't be grown together. It wasn't referring to cross pollination. What do you think?

It always seems scientifically dubious to me, a natural sceptic, but I first heard it from Jekka McVicar and she is usually reliable. I have a mixed bed as well and they are still different.

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I've looked at Jekka McVicar's site and she only says it " seems" to mix the flavours. I wonder if it is because smell and taste have an effect on one another, so you get a mix of scents if they are planted together and that confuses your sense of taste, in which case if you pick one variety and prepare and use it on its own the taste shouldnt be affected.

It makes me cross when people make sweeping statements with nothing to back them up.

I too have two different mints growing in the same bed - "ordinary" mint and an unspecified mint which looks completely different and I suspect may be spearmint. I use them together in dishes requiring herbs but am very careful to pick only the "ordinary" mint when I want to make mint sauce as I used a mixture on one occasion and did think the sauce tasted different on that occasion and not so traditionally minty.

I can see that you'd get a different flavour cooking different ones together but am at a loss to see how growing them together can make any difference as Mr Don stated on Gardener s World.

Hi PP.
I would suggest that the flowers mix is another way to say cross pollination and you would have to sow the progeny on to note the difference.

Hi Johnboy, it says the flavours mix by growing near one another, not the flowers cross pollinating. I think they are talking twaddle and just repeating something they have heard or read and passing it on as true like much of the rubbish swishing around the Internet.

I can't really see how growing the two together would make a difference to the flavour of either plant and have never seen any scientific proof that it happens. The flowers certainly might easily cross pollinate to produce inferior/mixed tasting seedlings and of course if you accidentally mixed them when picking/cooking the resulting flavour of the dish might be rather confused.