Ask the Gardener: How Do I Keep Mint from Taking Over?

Ask the gardener is a column in which local readers send in questions about your garden, lawn, trees and more.

Question of the week: How do I keep mint from spreading through my garden? It's taking over!

Karen Brock, of Thies Farms in Maryland Heights, took this week's question.

"You have to keep on cutting that back. It will definitely take over. If you’ve got a hard spot, the only way to prevent it is to just keep it cutting wherever you want it to stop. I try to rip it out because you can take the roots with it.

You could also put it in a container, that way it won’t spread. The thing with mint is that the roots go underneath toward the grass.

What kind of container should people use?

It doesn’t matter, some type of container that way you can kind of keep the roots from spreading.

Have another gardening question? Leave it in the comments and we'll try to track down the answer. 

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