Sometime during the pandemic, we decided to “adopt” some real plants to supplement all the fake ones we had bought from IKEA. In just a few weeks, we mail ordered one snake plant from plantsome.ca, bought some peace lily from the florist’s down the block, and picked up a pot of calla lily, some succulents, and a ZZ plant from IKEA and Home Depot.

Now the entire summer has passed. The calla lily has died from overwatering1, but the rest are thriving — the ZZ plant is still giving out new growth; the snake plant is now a lot taller. Peace Lily is the best and the blossoms are still strong.

Sometime after we got the plants, we decided to try growing mint. We started out by rooting 4 pieces of mint branches bought from T&T. Now, three months later, they fill the entire pot and are flowering. We are quite amazed at the mint: they just can’t die.

The mint responses so quickly to your care. Water them and they’d grow an inch overnight. Snip the flower on the top and the next morning, you’d see new growth on the leaf nodes.

The mint is also resilient. Soak the pot in water for a week, and they would keep growing. Leave them dry for 10 days (as we did when we traveled to Banff and Jasper) and they persevere despite the sun.

They are also quite rewarding — no more buying grocery store mints! Now the mint plants are beginning to grow bark and I’m sure they will go strong into the winter.

  1. We were under the impression that Calla Lily are quite water-hungry — and the plant pot would dry within days of a thorough round of watering. But as the blossoms wither, we should have scaled back on watering and let the plant go dormant. We just didn’t know better. (But now we do!)