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Planting
Days to maturity
Seasonal yields
Sow indoors · Direct sow · Transplant outdoors
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Plant · P-591
Peppermint
Mentha piperita
Peppermint is a fast-spreading perennial and one of the most useful herbal remedies in the mint family, its leaf and flowering shoot brewed for fevers, headaches, digestive upset and irritable bowel symptoms, alongside everyday use as a flavoring in tea, sweets and gum. In hot, humid summers it wants water rather than shade - it is grown as a commercial field crop with regular irrigation and mulch, though a little shade helps where it gets truly dry. It runs by rhizome and colonizes any damp open ground its roots reach, establishing from fragments as small as an inch, so it is normally kept behind a sunk barrier or hard edge rather than planted loose among other beds. Only the concentrated essential oil is a concern in pregnancy or at high dose; ordinary culinary use of the leaf is not.
Record at a glance
Growing profile
- Sun
- Full Sun · Partial Sun
- USDA zone
- USDA 5–9
- Soil
- Sand · Loam · Clay
- Moisture
- Moist · Wet
Vertical layer
Herbaceous- Soil pH
- 6–7
- Plant type
- Perennial
- Mature height
- 12–24 in
- Mature spread
- 12–24 in
- Plant spacing
- 18 in
- Root type
- Rhizome
- Spread pattern
- Root
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The deeper layer
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- Primary
- Locked ecological function
- Secondary
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- Byproduct
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Behind the record
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