As you have heard before, damper is relative...and the more barren areas it grows in nature, have good drainage, usually a slope. And....damp in Arkansas or Oklahoma is a lot different than damp in the NE. I'd suggest well-drained in your area.

I grow many kinds of mint...in the ground, but I have lots of space and my yard tends to be dry. None of it has spread to other areas of the property. I grow each kind in a different section and each has stayed isolated to its spot. I grow: Chocolate Mint Double Mint (the most pesky in wet areas) Spearmint Coconut Mint Apple Mint (the old-fashioned variety used with apples to making apple-mint jelly) I lost: (died out in the drought) Peppermint, Grapefruit Mint, Orange/Tangerine Mint, Balsam Mint, and a few others. I want to get another start of the peppermint and orange. I agree with Mary and Lorna. However, if you don't use it and don't like pulling weeds or chopping it out, and if you have wet soil, then it might be best to grow it in a container with saucer as was suggested. ~ sweetannie4u

Happy New Year, Sue. I'm glad we influenced you to start a blog. I hope that it continues to be a positive experience. I hope others will decide to start a blog in the new year. I know of at least one new blog that started from the idea planted here. It's a wonderful way to keep a log of the garden complete with pics and notes, while sharing your experiences with other gardeners. A blog can be as elaborate as the writer choses to make it, or just a sometimes record of what's growing and blooming. It doesn't have to be a daily burden, just a delightful task. Nell

Dorothy, It does sound like Johnsongrass, which is the bane of my existence here.....second only to bermuda. I try to keep it mowed down short because that seems to more or less control it, but those large, finger-sized rhizomes (yours might be wrist-sized since you get so much more moisture, LOL) creep into the edges of the veggie garden and flower beds and drive me bonkers. To make it worse (just the name association) our land was once part of the Johnson family farm, we live next door to the Johnson son and his family, we bought our land from one of the Johnson daughters, and our road is known locally as Johnson Road. So, when I am digging out Johnson grass, I am always wryly amused and ask myself if the road was named for the Johnson Family or the Johnson Grass! (And I love every member of the human Johnson family I've ever met, including in-laws and nieces and nephews, but the grass is a different story!!!) I used to have a lovely bed of daylilies that I put in the first year we moved here, but the Johnson grass kept infiltrating that bed over and over during our hot, droughty summers and I finally gave up and abandoned it and the Johnson grass choked out almost all the daylilies. One day, I will have a daylily bed closer to the house, but only after I have removed ALL the grass and taken measures to keep it from ever invading again. That first year, I was naive in thinking that if I removed all the rhizomes and enriched the hard, clay soil, the Johnson Grass would be manageable. It might have worked closer to the house...but this bed was about 200' from the house, down by the driveway/roadway, and it doesn't get any supplemental irrigation, so the Johnson grass, being more drought-tolerant, "won". I have planted a lot of trees around the house because we built in the only open area (not wanting to bulldoze huge trees in the woods) so we had no shade. I didn't do as good of a job as I should have at keeping the grass away from the roots of the young trees back then, but I'm doing better now and I think it does make a tremendous difference in how quickly they grow and also it makes a difference in how well they tolerate drought. I planted mint in clay soil in several areas and it lived for several years but it eventually died out during drought in 2003, a year in which we only had 18" of rainfall here (our worst year here by far, and that was the year the grasshoppers ate everything in sight, including fruit on the trees, the cotton rag rug on the porch, and our fiberglass window screens). I would never plant mint in the "good soil" in my flower beds or veggie garden for fear it would outcompete everything else, but I am going to plant it near the chicken coop and guinea coop where the combination of the hens "digging and scratching" and the increasing amount of shade have left a lot of bare soil in an area that used to have bermuda grass. (Yeah! Some of the trees are finally getting large enough to shade out bermuda.) When our fruit trees were younger I planted nasturtiums and garlic underneath them (nasturtiums to attract beneficial insects and garlic to repel borers), but the chickens liked the nasturtiums a little too much and the garlic merely disappeared. Dawn