Between transplanting and this summer’s drought the mint leaves
are tough and do not taste as good as the mint I dried last year. I should wait
and dry next summer’s mint for winter tea if I want to continue drinking mint
tea that doesn’t make me gag.
I’m not letting this summer’s mint go to waste. I’m going to
make peppermint essential oil with my garden peppermint to use in my homemade
shower cleaners.
OK, technically,
what I am making is not a pure peppermint essential oil. It is a peppermint tincture. To make an essential oil, you have to boil the herb in water,
capture the steam, and cool the steam into a liquid to extract the oil. That’s
why essential oils made with natural ingredients are often expensive (but so
much better in quality than the cheap synthetics. Not to mention, synthetic essential oils usually contain pthalates which are bad for you.) I'm calling it an essential oil in this post because that is what most people type into the almighty Google machine when they want to know how to make an herbal tincture.