Mint Resurrection

Much as it pains me to admit it, I am not the best gardener in the world. I try, but things die, usually because I treat them wrong, I suppose. Last year I did particularly badly, and almost everything new I planted disappeared. Betty down the road gave me a dozen anemone corms - I looked up the proper way to plant them, obeyed all the instructions to the letter, and not one of them ever came up. When I eventually emptied the planter I had put them in, there was no sign that anything had ever been there. The jasmine that Marjorie gave me started well, but didn't survive the winter. I bought a dozen alpines - half of them have done well, but the others have just disappeared. And I bought some herbs. There were half a dozen different ones - thyme, basil, chives, curry mint, rosemary - that I put in a planter together, and they are doing well. And a garden mint, mint sauce mint, which I put in a separate, large pot, where it grew well for a while and then died. It looked as if it had been got at and nibbled away.

Last weekend, almost a year later, I was gardening again. I've been given even more plants this year and some of them needed planting out in big pots. Being tidy minded and economical, I decided to finally give up on the mint and empty the pot to reuse the compost. In a horizontal line lining the pot about half way down, four or five inches from the surface, there was a strong white shoot circling round. Coming up vertically from this at regular intervals there were half a dozen white shoots, about an inch or so high, with what looked like miniature white leaves at the top. I didn't like to throw these in the compost bin, so I experimentally stuck them all in a small pot. Five days later they have gone green, the leaves have at least doubled in size and the shoots have grown taller! After I had tipped the old compost and buried mint plantlets out of the pot there were three slugs clinging to the inside about half way down, and I suspect that they were responsible for the original disappearance of the plant. They've been consigned to the compost heap, where a good slug belongs.

Now I'm not sure what to do - I bought another small mint plant from Lidl a couple of weeks ago which has survived so far. Should I risk putting all my new bits in one big pot, or should I stick bits here and there and hope? This is a very tentative mint resurrection, so far, but I feel more hopeful already. There will be mint sauce...