Yeah - mealybugs. Try what Minibot suggested - you can actually spray it with rubbing alcohol diluted with water 1:3 - be sure that you get in all the "armpits". Do it 3 times week apart and wipe the windowsill, saucers etc. with this solution - they lay eggs. There are more potent pesticides that kill them but try it first. Neem oil - I do not know - they are so well protected with their fuzz- which is eradicated with alcohol - the oil can just leave untidy spots on their furcoats, but not really reach them. Irina

No. Both are ingredients in many common potting mixes and assist with drainage. At least the perlite does........once vermiculite becomes fully saturated with water, it collapses and any drainage enhancement is lost. Better container potting mixes will generally always contain perlite or pumice but not vermiculite.

I had an experience that involved some gorgeous drip-glaze ceramic pots in 4 size sets I discovered at a Big Lots Stire. Sizes in the set ranged from about a quart in volume to maybe 2 gallons. I bought 10 sets (40 pots) on behalf of the San Toshi Bonsai Society in early spring. We also purchased 3 boxes (60 plants) of assorted dwarf conifers from Iseli Nursery, located in Oregon. We drilled holes in the bottom of the pots and transplanted the plants into the pots using the gritty mix so they would be well established in June for our fund-raiser sale at a local art fair. We had single and multi-plant plantings, as you would think would be the case if we had to fit 60 plants into 40 pots. The plants were well-established by the time of the art fair and were a hit with the patrons in spite of the fairly significant outlay. As I remember, we had about 4 plantings of various sizes that didn't sell. I took those home and put them on my grow benches to tend/prune them so we could sell them the following summer. Unfortunately, by August the plants I was tending were all in decline, the ceramic glaze on the pots had begun to craze, and at each of the cracks in the crazing pattern there was a growth of 'something' that looked exactly like the OP showed in the image (s)he provided. Since I had about 150 other conifers covering at least 20 species on the grow bench right next to the struggling plants, it didn't seem appropriate to assign the cause of the decline, which BTW ended in the death of the plants, to grower error - unless you consider choosing pots made with toxic materials to be my error. I have no problem accepting that responsibility, even though I had no reason to suspect that bowls meant to serve as a vessels to hold food for human consumption would be made with toxic ingredients that could be expected to leach into the bowls' contents. The bowls were made in China. While I can't witness with any certainty in the case at hand, I do strongly believe that in the case of the bowls I unfortunately discovered, one or more of the ingredients that were mixed together and formed into bowls before firing were, at a minimum, phytotoxic (poisonous to plants) and at the root of the weird formations that formed at the cracks in the bowls' finish. Remember, because of the soils I use and my watering habits, a build-up of dissolved solids in the soil is dubious in the extreme as causal of the growth formations I saw. Finally, as I remember, I had a strong sense these 'formations' were not organic in nature and were the outgrowth of the chemical formations formed that water as it evaporated left behind. Al

Is this mint indoors? It is very difficult to grow healthy mint in a house. It appears to be in a wooden container. Does it have drainage holes? This looks like an unhealthy mint which has succumbed to a mold and possibly a slug, snail or caterpillar rather than an insect.