Are thyme and pineapple mint (variegated) too invasive to be planted in the ground? I'm in z7, MD.
Are these invasive?
Hi Capt. Thyme is fine in the ground but any kind of mint is really prolific. I have different kinds of mint planted around shrubs that I have growing on their own out on the lawn. I have pineapple mint (variegated) around my flowering almond. The mint spreads out but I keep it mowed off into a circle around the bush. It looks quite attractive. I can't send a picture cause I'm in the country and am still on dial up - unbelievable. It takes ages to upload.
Plant chocolate mint around a tree and enjoy it every time you mow! mmmm
My lemon thyme ran like crazy in the ground. The rest of the thymes are fairly well behaved. Mints run and seed aggressively for me.
I have the regular thyme. So if your lemon one ran like crazy in zone 3, I'm concerned about mine here in zone 7. Maybe I'll keep both confined to pots. I can't mow around where I would have planted them.
There are only a few thymes that are invasive as far as I know and I think it depends on site conditions. Do you know which one you have? Thoughts southerners?
My lemon thyme doesn't really spread at all. I'd consider it a slow spreader if anything. In fact, I lose a portion of it in the winter. Nothing like mint.
Have you ever tried wooly thyme? You can't eat it, but it is quite pretty as a front border. It's kind of a grey color, about an inch high and spreads to about 3 feet but really isn't intrusive. A little story on the inability to kill mint. I dug up some peppermint I was silly enough to plant directly into the ground in one of my herb gardens. I had hammered in a sheet of metal to deter the roots from travelling but they just went under it. Mint isn't stupid you know! Anyway, I dug it up and threw it on a bank I am allowing to naturalize. A little piece fell on the lawn. I didn't notice it for a few days and the little rascal rooted right there. Hardy little devils are mint!!!
I've got several types of low thyme growing in z10b and none of them run - I'd be happy if they did, as I'm using them for groundcover.
Gardengab. I understand your delima with not posting pics cause your on dial up, I had to download a program called irfanview it's a resizing program free to download, and it will resize your pictues for you , now I have no problem what so ever uploading pictures to daves garden , takes about 1 minute per picture to upload and sometims less than that. Our internet is horrid, here, this program really works great. takes a minute or so to figure out how to use the program, but easy once you get it going.
I dunno what kind it is. I bought it from Home Depot, it was with the herbs.
There's a Window's power tool that will resize pics really quickly too and very simply. I have it.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx
Scroll down the page, it's called: Image Resizer.
This PowerToy enables you to resize one or many image files with a right-click.