Why does my homegrown catnip smell more lemony minty than the kind i buy at the store?
Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at
7:00 am
I got into growing catnip for fun and my friends cats but it seems that my catnip smells more lemony and minty than that of the kind of catnip I buy at the stores? Why is that so? Will the cats still react to it the same? How can I get the stores scent? Is it a different kind of catnip or what? Please tell me
Filed under: Catnip
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There could be two reasons for this. Number one, your catnip is fresh and therefor has more of the essential oils in it than the catnip at the store, which was picked/cut weeks or even months ago.
Number two, there are many different varieties of catnip. If yours smells lemony then there’s a good chance that you got lemon catnip whereas the kind most commonly sold in stores is just common catnip. It smells somewhat minty because, well all varieties of catnip are a type of mint. Supposedly, cats do not like citrus smells so in theory lemon catnip would be less attractive to them than common catnip or one of the other varieties of catnip. However the compounds that causes a cat to react to catnip are still present in lemon catnip and it should cause the same reaction if the cat doesn’t decide that the lemon smell is offensive and avoids it all together.
If you want to tone down the lemony smell a bit and make your catnip smell more like the stuff you buy in the store then all you have to do is dry it before using it. You can do this with a dehydrator or simply hang the catnip upside down in a cool, dry place for a few weeks. Cutting your catnip later in the day, as opposed to early in the morning, will also make it smell less strongly because the essential oils in the mint are at their strongest/fullest in the early morning and recede back into the roots and the base of the plant as the day progresses.
your catnip is fresh… so that’s probably why it smells different
Yours is not processed and dried like the stores.What a nice hobby
to have.
Are you sure you have catnip? There is also a plant called catmint which is not catnip.
I have grown catnip for decades and I never think of it as smelling like a lemon.
However, it could be, as someone else said, you’ve just never smelled fresh catnip before.
The type you want is Nepeta Cataria http://faculty.ucc.edu/biology-ombrello/pow/catnip.htm
Check to see what the full name is of the plant you have.
On that page, there is a little saying "If you set it, the cats will eat it. If you sow it, the cats won’t know it."
What they mean is that if you plant a catnip plant the cats will eat it in the plant bed but if you sow seeds they won’t eat it.
I’ve never known that to be true. I let plants self seed but I also buy new plants and I also transplant new seedlings. I have never seen any difference in how cats react to plants in the plant bed which were from seeds or plants from starter plants.
As to how your cats will react to your catnip, why not pinch of a few leaves and see how your cats react to it?
As you may know, some cats will act silly with catnip, some will just eat it, and some don’t react at all.
However, the majority of cats will react in some way to catnip. Young kittens often don’t react to catnip until they get older.