From the mouse infested studios Lehigh Valley Public Media in Bethlehem, PA, it's time for another minty fresh episode of chemical free horticultural hiji jinks.

You bet your garden.

I'm your host!

Mike McGrath will mint planted around your perimet deter miserable messes from dini on your mounds bars.

On today's show, we'll reveal th surprising answer and put anothe stake in the heart of those dead mothballs.

Otherwise, it's a fabulous phone call show cats and kittens.

Yes, potential guests are busy getting minty fresh, so we will that heaping helping of your telecommunication questions, comments, tips, tricks, suggesti and effusively elongated Eden creations.

So keep your eyes and ears right here, true believers, because it's all coming up faste than you not finding those distinctive little pellets in yo pantry.

Right after this.

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From the studios of Rodale Institute Radio and television at Lehigh Valley Public Media in Bethlehem, PA, I am your host, Mike McGrath, and I am really excited about the question of the week we have this time around.

It's some new and startling information about mints and mice.

You really won't want to miss this one, and you won't!

Just stay tuned through a bunch of fabulous phone calls at 833 727 95 888.

- Hi, Mike, how are you?

- I'm just Ducky, thanks for asking, Alice, and Ducky's happy to say hello.

Keep your mask on, Ducky.

Make sure it covers your nose.

How are you?

- I'm well, I'm well here in Long Beach Island, New Jersey.

- All right.

What can we do for you in paradise?

- For the first time this year, I decided to grow potatoes.

- Right.

- And I grew them in barrels, two different kinds.

I grew red and I grew Yukon gold.

I did not separate them.

I'm not sure if I should have or not.

But what I did was I heard your episode about the potatoes, the plants producing flowers, - the color of the potatoes.

- Right.

But that never happened.

So I waited and I waited and this went on for months.

And then I heard recently one of your episodes and you said - that doesn't always happen.

- Right.

So I thought, OK, so I'm going to pull them all up.

If it worked, fine.

If it didn't, it was an experience.

I pulled them all up and I got more potatoes than I could believe.

- Uh huh.

- One of the things that happened that surprised me was the Yukon Gold had little... red potatoes attached to them, little, - like the size of a marble.

- Right.

I, I don't know if I did something wrong.

If this is common.

Should I have separated them, planted them differently?

- What happened?

- Well, it's interesting what you're saying.

Looking back on what I've done, I have always kept the variety separate, not for any special reason, just try to keep track of what grew well, what might not have done well.

But I have seen these junior potatoes attached to my potatoes.

Now, of course, there was just one variety in each of my raised beds, or I used Growbags this year, they worked out great.

But, you know, once the potatoes really start growing, once all that greenery appears on top, you've got all these roots and on the roots, the tubers are produced, so if the roots are tangled around each other, it's quite possible that a red potato could grow into a Yukon gold.

And it's interesting that it didn't get too big, and you say it is firmly attached as if it was just an offshoot of the same potato.

- Yes, firmly attached.

- Well, that's great.

I mean, I can't imagine how much fun that must be to look at, but there's certainly no harm.

You didn't do anything wrong.

As you said, you got a great harvest of potatoes, as did we.

This was a banner year for potatoes for us.

Now, when you harvested your potatoes, did you take one and eat it raw?

- I did not.

Should I?

I just did it two days ago - so I can still do it.

- OK.

Pick a really nice one and run it under cold water for a while.

Clean off any dirt or if there's a bad spot and then you can salt it or pepper it or anything like that, but just bite into it raw.

Really?

You will be... Well, the only people who've ever truly tasted a potato are the people who grow potatoes, because even the ones we buy fresh in the store have been in storage.

So a fresh potato out of the ground has not lost all of that moisture that potatoes deliberately lose during storage.

So some of them are as juicy as a tomato.

- Oh, wow, good to know.

- Yeah, only a gardener can taste that.

- Well, let me ask you another question about planting the potatoes.

When you plant potatoes, someone told me that you plant them deep and as the greenery grows, you keep adding soil to it.

- No.

- Is that correct?

Until it reaches the top of the level.

- Oh, OK. - No, that that sounds more like leeks, or somebody planting a series of potatoes in something like an open sided compost bin.

Then you would fill the bottom only with your soil, plant, like, four potatoes, one pointing out each side.

Then you could put on more soil and then another run of potatoes.

But in this case, the greenery is going to go out the side slats.

- Gotcha.

Right.

- Yeah.

- Let me ask you something.

I'm sorry, I interrupted you.

- No, go ahead.

- I also was told you shouldn't plant potatoes with anything else.

To keep them separate?

- Well, yeah, why?

How would you plant them with something else?

I mean, they take up space above ground and below ground.

- Right, but I think they meant not to plant it even next to anything.

I did mind purposely in barrels for that reason, so it wouldn't come in contact with anything.

- Oh, that's nonsense.

That's nonsense.

- Another piece of nonsense!

Do sweet potatoes work the same way?

- Sweet potatoes do not work the same way.

With sweet potatoes, you take a, quote, seed potato, but you bury it halfway in sand indoors and keep the sand moist and keep it under bright light.

And it produces these things called slips, these little greeneries.

And after all chance of frost has passed, you plant the slips as you would plant annual flowers or peppers.

You plant those with their roots just in the soil, but the greenery above ground, and then they grow very fast.

They take over that entire bed, and after about 100 days, you can harvest your sweet potatoes.

- You have been really helpful.

Apparently I've picked up a lot of information that wasn't incorrect.

Thank you for straightening that out.

- I appreciate it.

- Yeah.

Good luck.

- Thank you so much.

Thanks for taking my call, Mike.

- Oh, my pleasure.

Take care.

All right.

That number to call, write it on the wall.

Don, welcome to You Bet your garden.

- Mike, thanks for taking my question.

Boy, do I need some help.

- OK, good.

Well, so do I.

Maybe we can help each other out, you know.

Where are you Don?

- I am in Morrisville, Pennsylvania.

We're right across the river from Trenton, New Jersey.

- OK, very good.

Yes.

Now I know where you are.

All right.

What can we do you for?

- I grow sweet potatoes, I really like them.

I did it last year and I did everything great until the harvest, and after that I screwed everything up.

When I harvested them, I think I probably waited too long, I had some mega sweet potatoes, like two, - three pounders.

- Right.

And I washed them off and set them in the fridge.

- OK. Yeah.

- And after about two weeks, I had kind of mushy, - inedible sweet potatoes.

- Yeah.

So you want to hear about the secrets of curing.

- Yes, please.

Because I've done my Google research and nobody says - the same thing twice.

- Really?

OK, well, back when I was... We're relying on my memory here.

Which is always dangerous, but what I remember, our standard advice back in the 90s was you harvest your sweet potatoes...

I would not wash them any more than I would wash, quote, Irish potatoes, when I harvest them.

I wash them before eating.

But of all sorts of bad things can happen when you wet certain plants.

So what I remember being told is to take your harvest and put it in a plastic bag inside a cardboard box, on the porch of Funk & Wagnall's... No, in a cardboard box that's exposed to high humidity and fairly high heat for a certain amount of time, I believe it was between one and two weeks, maybe it was ten days, and then they should be stored in a cold environment, but I'm not sure a refrigerated environment.

Can you...?

Well, I was going to say jury rig anything like a cold cellar or anything like that, The mice are just going to eat them all.

- Yeah, I have a basement, but that's about as good as I can do.

- Is it unheated?

- Nah, it's heated.

- OK, well, you... - I can reach a portion of it that is not, I think.

There's an addition on to the house where the space under there is not heated.

- Right.

OK, well, first of all, I don't think you're letting them get to ginormous size was any kind of mistake.

In your climate, our climate, kind of, a lot of people don't actually get sweet potatoes because it takes so long to grow them.

So you had them out there right after all chance of frost was gone.

- Yeah, it was between Mother's Day and Memorial Day.

- OK, yeah.

And obviously you planted them under the right conditions.

Now, as I was saying, the high humidity and heat in the back of my mind is going, well, where's this?

Where's this perfect place?

And then I suddenly realized it's the bathroom.

Where you take a lot of hot showers and stuff.

- Yeah!

- So I think that would supply the humidity.

- Oh, I get ya.

How about this?

I start my own seeds.

And so, you know, I have lights and seed mats, heated seed mats.

Could I put them on the heated seed mat?

It'd give them the heat, but it wouldn't give them the humidity.

- What kind of seed mat is it?

- Is it a big rubber one?

- Yeah.

It's a big rubber one, about two by three or something like that.

- I would be interested in the results.

If you put a large pan of water, or as we say in Philly, warter, on top of the heat mat and then put like a grill on top of that and then put the sweet potatoes on top of that so they get heat and humidity.

- I can do that.

- Yeah.

And also, I mean, if you have this good of a harvest next year, you can try it all.

- Well, thank you.

- All right, Don.

- I'm less confused now.

- Yeah, well, the curing process can be confusing, so don't feel bad about that.

- Yeah, especially if you did it wrong once.

- Well, that's how we learn, that's how men learn.

- Yes, yes.

And I've been learning a lot lately.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, we'll die smart.

All right, man.

Take care.

- Thank you very much.

That number to call.

- Thank you.

- How are you doing, Michael?

- I'm doing well.

- And where is Michael doing well?

- I'm doing well in Georgetown, Delaware.

- OK, very good.

What can we do you for?

- Well, I'm a first time raised bed garden gardener.

- Right.

- For probably 45 years, I used the rototiller.

I had rows, I hoed, I raked, I, you know, mulched, and did everything like that in a big garden.

In fact, I said my family and my garden, we had a garden, - 40 by 70.

- Mm hmm.

So now I have a raised bed garden - and I've got tomato plants.

- Right.

And I went out to check the tomato plants and I saw this green worm, caterpillar about the size of my index finger.

- Yep.

And it had a lot of white dingle-dangles on it.

- Oh, excellent, excellent.

- Well, we picked two of them and put them somewhere else.

Get them away from the tomato plants because they were - stripping the tomato plants.

- Oh, yeah.

No, these are, I believe, the largest caterpillars in North America.

If they're not the largest, they're right up there, and they are voracious.

You probably have the tomato hornworm.

There's also a very closely related species called the tobacco hornworm, and they pretty much look the same.

But they can totally defoliate plants.

I had them as a problem when I was a young gardener and then hadn't had them again literally for years.

And I guess it was four or five years ago I went out to my garden and where the tomatoes met the top of my cages, everything was eaten off.

And I thought somehow deer had come in with little stepladders or something to get up there.

And then I looked down at the bottom of the plant and I saw these piles of frass, which is a $20 word for bug poop.

And they not only eat a huge, almost unbelievable amount, they poop out an unbelievable amount.

Now, those white dingle dangles on the back of your caterpillars, each one of those is a cocoon.

The caterpillar has been parasitized by a wasp that is so small we can barely see it.

But when the wasp lands on the caterpillar, she injects her eggs into the caterpillar and then using the caterpillar's own bodily resources, these little cocoons are built up and when each cocoon hatches, out come more of these beneficial mini wasps.

So if you find a tomato hornworm on your tomatoes that is naked on the back, you can squish it to your heart's content.

But if you find it with those birth cones on the back, what I do is I find a tomato plant that isn't looking good or that's a little crowded at the bottom and I pull off some branches, and then I take those branches over to a different part of the garden and put the caterpillar on top of them.

Because the caterpillar will be dead very soon.

It's really cool to leave them on the plant if you've got enough tomatoes, because they shrivel up as the wasps inside get bigger.

But then, you know, farmers buy these wasps from beneficial insectaries that raise them.

You are doing the same thing when you protect those ones with the cocoons on the back until the wasps emerge.

And, you know, really, by the time you can see the cocoons, if they're a good size, that caterpillar is going to be dead within a few days.

- OK, well, I guess we committed a sin then because we thought they were caterpillar eggs, so we killed five of them.

- OK, well, you know, this is the only... this is the only way we learn.

And caterpillars do lay eggs, but they don't look like that.

Would be interesting.

It'd be like a seahorse caterpillar carrying its young around on its back.

- Now, what do we do to keep them from eating our tomato plants?

- Well, you know, really with tomato hornworms, they don't show up every year.

Some years they do.

Some years they don't.

But the daily inspection is really all you need.

- Thank you, Mike.

I appreciate your advice.

- My pleasure.

You take care, sir.

- Bye.

- As promised, it's the question of the week you've been waiting to hear.

We're calling it of mice and mint and mothballs.

James in Oklahoma City titles his email Mint versus Mighty Mouse, and his friends and family.

He writes, is there any scientific basis to show that planting mint around your house will repel mice and other rodents?

This is the time of year that they're trying to get into the house, of course The short answer is no.

The long answer is that it appears that mint used in a really different way will keep mice from eating your unprotected edibles.

The short story, as far as I can research, there's absolutely no proof that any plant in the ground will keep insects and or vermin out of a designated area.

Yes, if you planted nothing but strongly scented mints tightly together in your garden, there probably wouldn't be any mice going in there.

But that's very different from protecting a house.

You would essentially have to dig a moat around your entire place and fill it with mint, which sounds like too much trouble to protect your supply of Triscuits.

And within a few years, your entire neighborhood would be overwhelmed with mint, and then the mice would no longer be your primary problem.

Let's take this moment to remind and or inform everyone out there that any plant in the mint family, which includes plants without mint in their name like lemon balm, is difficult or impossible to control once planted.

Mints are wonderful plants, but they are aggressive, invasive and harder to kill than Mickey's broomstick in The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

Back to mice, neither mighty nor Mickey.

I didn't want to rely on my old knowledge here, so I did a fair amount of new research and found an excellent YouTube channel called Mouse Trap Monday, wherein a guy named Sean Woods is testing everything that people say will repel mice, describing his research projects in depth along the way.

These aren't just your average YouTube videos.

These are citizen science at its highest level.

And they're also fun to watch.

I'll get to his revealing test of mint in a minute.

But one of the things that impressed me most were the things that he tested that didn't work.

Irish Spring, the mice actually ate that horrifically scented soap.

The dreaded Carolina Reaper Hot Pepper - the mice enjoyed eating that as well.

Dryer sheets, predator urines, all were a bust.

So you can't fault Sean for being somewhat doubtful about peppermint oil.

But he tested a commercial product from Victor, the world's leading producer of mouse and rat traps - holders filled with the essential oils of peppermint.

For his experiments, he created a specially constructed drawer out in the barn.

And like all good scientists, he made two, one containing the supposedly active substance being tested and one that was baited without the supposed repellent.

Both drawers had just one tiny entrance hole that would allow mice to enter and leave, and both, as per previous experiments, were baited with sunflower seeds, a favorite food of miserable meeces.

The package he purchased had two mint releasing egg shaped capsules, which he hung at opposite ends of the test drawer, poured some seeds into the drawer and shut it normally.

I'll let you know why that's important in a minute.

In what I'll call the control drawer, he just put the seeds and then slid that drawer back into place.

In an additional factor, both brilliant and seriously creepy, he had night vision cameras set up to capture the action.

The footage shows mice coming into the drawer with the mint-releasing devices and exiting faster than a vampire in a crucifix factory, while every seed in the untreated drawer was dined upon with fervor.

I am therefore convinced that essential oil of mint placed in the drawers and pantries in which you would normally find evidence of mouse invasion is a great idea.

And yes, you can grow the actual mint and use whole branches crushed up to release the scent, or extract the oil yourself.

Just try and contain the spread of those plants and replace your homemade repellent every 30 days or so.

More importantly to me, Sean also provided concrete evidence of the ineffective of a popular but high dangerous home remedy - mothballs.

Thankfully, he spends the first minute of this video explaining the serious toxicity of these little cancer bombs and warns that it is a violation of federal law to use mothballs against mice.

But I would never throw this guy under the Federales bus because he proved that mothballs do not work.

Same two drawers.

First, he puts one mothball into the corner of each test drawer.

Hey, Sean, wear gloves next time, and have your kidney checked soon.

The mice enter and gorge themselves on the seeds despite the mothballs.

He tries again, this time slitting open the plastic and putting in the entire package.

And he cheats in favor of the mothballs by putting a hard plastic cover on top to concentrate the fumes.

Now, you and I would run out of this deathtrap immediately, but the mice are undeterred, eating every seed.

This reinforces what I've been saying about mothballs for untold decades.

Do not use them.

They are more toxic to you than your intended target.

And now we also know that they just don't work.

Thank you, Sean.

I'm now a fan of Mouse Trap Monday.

Well, that sure was some good information Well, that sure was some good information about deterring miserable messes now, wasn't it?

Luckily, you can read that artic over at your leisure or your lei because the question of the week appears in print at the Gardens Live website.

Just click the lin for the question of the week at website, which is still and will forever be.

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I'm your host, Mike McGrath, and I'll be outside sucking up leave and picking mint until I see you again next week.