So this past week I had one of those moments where I was feeling particularly frugal and DIY-y and found myself in possession of a lot of mint.

Like, literal mint. This is not slang for something else. Or money. Sadly.

I bought a mint plant a few weeks ago for like £1.50. That seemed crazy to me. And I really love plants. And I like mint flavored things. No brainer right?

Friends. Mint grows fast. Really fast.

I now have a lot of mint.

So I Googled, what do you do with a lot of mint? Because despite my best intentions, all I was really doing with it was making tea. Which wasn’t a bad use by any means and is quite delicious. But one can only drink so much mint tea and it turns out that even when I tell my mint plant it could grow a little slower if it wanted to, it’s an ambitious plant.

And this led me to mint extract, which, to be very honest, feels like I’m just shifting the problem down the line because I don’t exactly use a ton of mint extract either. And extracts in general. And vanilla extract, which I do use regularly as an occasional baker.

All of this felt very homestead-y and like, this must be a smart, cheap move, right? I’ve got my £1.50 mint plant over here and now I am like queen of the good, natural choices, making my own mint extract instead of giving big ‘ol Tesco my money and surely their extracts wouldn’t be as good as an extract I make on my own in the kitchen, right?

I decided I was going to be frugal and natural and all that and make these extracts.

So I bought two small bottles (one for mint and one for vanilla) for £7.00. And then I needed a funnel for another £1.95. It turns out the base of extracts is alcohol, though the internet did tell me to buy bottom shelf vodka for this so that was another £8.00. Vanilla beans are apparently quite expensive, but you can reuse them like forever (don’t quote me on that – you can reuse them, I have no idea for how long). But I managed to find 6 beans at the local health food store for about £3.00 (though they were questionably just labelled vanilla bean pods and apparently there are different kinds of vanilla and I’ll never know what kind these cheap vanilla bean pods are).

A mere £21.45 later and I have a little jar of mint extract and vanilla extra fermenting?  congealing? happening in a dark corner of my kitchen. You know, exactly the kind of things a modern woman who grew up in a microwave dinner kind of household was raised to fear mightily.

Amazon informs that if I wasn’t so frugal and amazing about this, I would’ve had to pay a whole £1.80 for 35 ml of peppermint extract and £5.72 for some vanilla extract. Of course, 35 ml is less than the 8 oz. bottles I’ll have but exactly how much of this stuff am I going to use?

And as I came out of the other end of this process, I was struck, as I often am, but how much extra you have to invest in upfront to be “frugal.” There is genuinely a barrier to entry to these options that we don’t talk about a lot. Money has been a little tight lately and since I bought these items one by one across a few different trips, it wasn’t until I stood at the counter, muddling some mint leaves, that I realized this whole thing was likely a lot more expensive than just buying some mint extract… which I didn’t even really need. I just had all these mint leaves!

Another fun fact about making extracts is that I won’t actually have any mint extract for at least 1-6 months and vanilla is more like 6 months to a year. These projects require commitment, friends.

Have you ever tried to do something that seemed frugal only to figure out it probably wasn’t (unless I develop an intense love of mint extract and start drinking daily mint juleps… which doesn’t sound like the worst outcome really)?