Around this time on the calendar in years past, Bill Dohn would be getting out of town. His farm, Dohn & Dohn Gardens in Louisville, Kentucky, has supplied the mint used by Churchill Downs – two tons of it annually – for the mint juleps served at the Kentucky Derby since 1980. With that out of the way, Dohn usually escaped to a nearby lake to avoid the craziness of Derby Week.

Dohn retired last year, renting out his land and some equipment, but he still keeps tabs on things at the farm that this year was again scheduled to supply another massive haul of mint to the racetrack, enough for 127,000 mint juleps. But like nearly every other sporting event, the Kentucky Derby has been postponed by the novel coronavirus pandemic, moving from the first Saturday in May to, hopefully, the first Saturday in September.

“It’ll be a hardship,” Dohn said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “In any type of farming, sometimes you have a very good year, but most of the time you have a lot of challenges. It’s always something. My wife is always joking, ‘What’s it going to be this year?’ Because it’s always a problem, whether it’s labor or whether you’re having a dry spell or a cold snap.”

Mint takes up about 2.5 acres of Dohn’s 10-acre farm, which also grows kale and collard greens. The plants that were supposed to be harvested for Churchill Downs this year instead will be mowed off and regrown with the triple hope that the race will be run in September, that spectators will be allowed to attend, and that they’ll still have an appetite for the cocktail consisting of mint, bourbon and simple syrup.

“You cut the mint, you mow it off, fertilize it and water it and take care of it and weed it, and then it grows back,” Dohn said of the perennial. “In about six weeks, you can harvest more of it.”

“So the plan is … normally you have nice and pretty spring mint,” he continued. “The track is supposedly going to run in September. The plan is that we’re going to try and set it up so that we have most of it mowed off, and then it can grow back out in time to be the right size in September … so we’re not getting older mint and it’s the nice, fresh, young stuff.”

The farm actually sells more mint to other buyers, including Kroger grocery stores, but that doesn’t mean the Kentucky Derby’s postponement isn’t a hardship. Two tons is a lot of mint.

“Hopefully you’re going to have (the Derby) in September, but you don’t know that yet, either,” Dohn said. “It’s a very big chunk of our annual income here at the farm.”

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