Why midges don't like mint

Plant potatoes on Good Friday, grow beans in a horse-hair mattress and scatter elephant dung to keep out roe deer. Jeremy Hobson searches for the truth in our gardening folklore

IT was always sunny and warm during the summers of my 1960s childhood— at least in my memories. Butterflies fluttered, bees buzzed and midges and mosquitoes bit with incessant regularity.

Something of a pest myself, I recall one time ‘helping’ my aged maternal grandfather as he scythed the orchard grass to make winter hay for his goats and complaining about getting bitten. Somewhat irritable himself, he pointed to the cap he was wearing, told me to stop whining and to go and pick myself some mint.

Up until that point, I’d failed to notice the sprig of mint jauntily tucked into the neb of his cap and, in the time-honoured way small children have of asking non-stop questions, I quizzed him, discovering that he’d always been of the thinking that mint kept the midges away. How and why, he couldn’t explain.

Countrymen have long believed in traditional customs, remedies and sayings without knowing the reasoning behind them. Occasionally erroneous, there is, nevertheless, often a factual element attached to such thinking.

In the world of vegetable growing, there are edicts and maxims aplenty. There is, for example, a long-held supposition that the first potatoes must be planted on Good Friday. Why? Everyone accepts this as important gardening lore because, germinating at that time of the year, they stand less chance of being killed off by frost. In reality, the date can’t be important, as Good Friday varies from year to year.

The real reason the tradition started is because Good Friday was the first time country workers had had a break since the New Year and it was, therefore, their first real opportunity to get out into the garden.