Why Is My Mint Turning Black?

I checked on my garden the other day and to my surprise, some of my mint leaves were black. Like this:

Black mint

My first thought: It has some plant disease I've not heard of. But then I did as I always do in these situations, and I Googled it. I often feel like I garden by Google these days. I mean, how did gardeners get by without Google? I'm only partly kidding ...

At any rate, it appears that mint sometimes turns black when it has had too much water. It's been very hot, so I've been watering every day, when the soil looked dry. But I'm going to switch to the strategy of waiting until the mint looks like it needs water, and then water it, and see whether that takes care of this little problem.

Building My Defenses Against Pests, Naturally

In my second year of gardening, I'm super-paranoid that my garden is going to get taken over by pests of all stripes. The horror stories I read online have entire gardens getting swallowed whole by a monster swarm of something - slugs, beetles, whatever.

Last year I had very little issue with pests in my garden, which is lucky because I had no idea what I was doing. I've read a lot since then and of course learned from the issues I did have last year.

While my gardening is not strictly organic, I have no desire to put pesticides on the plants I plan to put in my mouth. I also respect the animals - including my dog - that may venture into the garden from time to time.

What surprised me in my reading was that certain plants actually can act like pesticides without the chemicals. Plants like garlic, onion, sage, mint and others have a stronger smell and may mask the smell of other plants that attract the insects we do not want to attract to our gardens. Certain flowers are recommended as well. I plan to plant some of those as well right next to my garden.

There are also plants that attract the right kind of insects to your garden, but I haven't gotten that far yet. Baby steps.

I started with sage and mint.

This weekend I planted both. I planted the mint in containers, set in two places in the garden.