Shop Products
Houzz Logo Print
njtea

Garlic mustard

njtea
17 years ago

There's an interesting article in the Science section of today's NY Times regarding garlic mustard. It would appear that the garlic mustard kills off the beneficial fungi that seedling native trees need in order to grow properly.

So - keep pulling up/killing that garlic mustard.

Comments (9)

  • birdgardner
    17 years ago

    Except for Norway maples. They seem fine.

  • birdgardner
    17 years ago

    http://forests.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=55617

    There's a link.

    I cannot tell you how much I loathe this stuff. A few, very few native plants occasionally make a reappearance out of the blue in my yard, which was farmland for two or three centuries before it was a yard. They spread slowly and the garlic mustard is wildfire.

    I am quite sure that garlic mustard, Norway maple and deer are a vicious synergy - at least the deer benefit the maple and mustard, but they will starve when there is nothing else left.

    Garlic mustard sprayed with Weed-B-Gone was eaten by something. Not good. It takes a high concentration of Round-up, maybe three or four times the usual?

    Back to pulling. I wonder how small a root fragment will grow a new plant.

  • njtea
    Original Author
    17 years ago

    Garlic mustard is a biennial so, in theory, you should just be able to snap the flower heads off to prevent reseeding and thereby eventually eliminate it.

    Not trusting that method, I've had good luck with a Weed-B-Gone type herbicide as well as Round-up.

    I asked a question about deer starving themselves out on a listserve in which I participate. The majority of reponses said that in suburbia and even rural areas they will never starve down to reasonable numbers as long as homeowners continue to plant vegatative materials they will eat.

    A couple of individuals said they felt that coyotes were beginning to take deer and starting to control their numbers in certain areas of the state. I can't verify that at all.

  • birdgardner
    17 years ago

    Any coyote that could take a deer could take my two youngest children. I saw one dead on the road a mile or so away - that one was not real big - hope they don't get bigger.

    Garlic mustard can bloom the first year - there are little wispy midget stealth garlic mustard plants three inches high with only a couple flowers - you overlook them going after the big ones and they reseed the area with an evil little garlic laugh - and are fully capable of producing big thuggish progeny. It's not like you can select for relatively innocuous little garlic mustard.

    I suspect they're perennial from the roots myself.

    This is almost the weed from hell, adaptable, fast-growing, smothering, allopathic, early blooming, perennial (I think), inedible by wild-life, and regrowing from root fragments. It lacks thorns, a foul smell, and skin irritants. Weed from heck.

  • njtea
    Original Author
    17 years ago

    I'm going to argue this one with your, Birdgardner. :) Two citations listing it as a biennial, one here and one linked:

    http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/invasives/terrestrialplants/herbaceous/garlicmustard.html

    I do agree that very small plants do bloom. If you look closely around the now-blooming plants, you'll see the seedlings of next year's bloomers.

    It is believed that the coyotes here on the East Coast may be larger than their western cousins and have slowly begun to learn to hunt in packs, like wolves, and that is allowing them to bring down a deer.

    Here is a link that might be useful: Garlic Mustard

  • njtea
    Original Author
    17 years ago

    From a source on another forum:

    "I think it is best described as a "pain in the butt-ennial". Based on what I remember from Nature Conservancy stewards and an email from Don Freiday at NJ Audubon, I think that the seed bed can last ten years or so."

  • mprats
    17 years ago

    I refuse to use chemicals in my garden (except when it comes to poison ivy), so I've been pulling the garlic mustard by hand. In two years I have seen the numbers decrease significantly, but what good does it do when your neighbor does not control his? When I leave this house, the garlic mustard will take over again, I am sure.

  • birdgardner
    17 years ago

    I am promoting this to the weed from hell category. I am now suffering from a bad back, caused by in part bending to pull, un-flower, and spray garlic mustard.

    What I need is a long-wanded, lightweight sprayer. Mprats, I don't like to spray, but pulling or mowing didn't seem to help - it was coming back from root fragments. Glyphosphate breaks down into harmless components and I am not near water, wetlands or vernal pools.

    And my neighbor weed-whacked his! Yay! That's a start!

    Njtea, some biennials will go perennial if you take off the
    flower heads.

  • njtea
    Original Author
    17 years ago

    I just came in from pulling what I would like to believe is the last of the flowering garlic mustard. I did note that along two deer trails, the plants had been eaten - the flower heads were gone. Was it deer or rabbits - I don't know, but something was eating it.

    On another note, I was over in an area where I had applied pre-emergent to try to keep down the stilt grass and I noticed very few stilt grass seedlings. That's good news.

Sponsored
Grow Landscapes
Average rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars8 Reviews
Planning Your Outdoor Space in Loundon County?