garlic mustard

Here is a link that might be useful: garlic mustard

crap! crap! crap! I had no idea that's what it was!!!

It showed up three or so years ago on a hillside and now it's taking over. We have seven-plus acres adjoining thousands of acres of open space. I do NOT want to see this spread any further. Am I looking at Roundup to tackle such a large infestation?

Oh, before I go all nuclear, is there ANY food or medicine-based use for this thing?

Here is a link that might be useful: hillside infestation

This link is to an excellent document on managing this weed. Glyphosate can be used, but there are other methods as well. Good luck.

Here is a link that might be useful: TNC garlic mustard abstract

It's a biennial. Try to get as many as possible by the root before they flower (probably too late for this year).

Save yourself some trouble and pull up a whole lot of the seedlings now.

Then continue pulling or weed-whacking regularly through the summer to keep it in check. This years rosettes will be next year's flowers. Any that do not die over winter need to be pulled in very early spring (late March to mid-April) before they flower.

The seed bank should be exhausted in about five years IF you get all of the plants before they flower. Just remember: seedlings to rosettes year one, rosettes flower year two, plant dies. Interrupt the flowering stage and you eventually knock out the plant. Patrol religiously for any strays, and REMOVE any second year plants from the site (bag and set out for garbage pickup, don't compost or they might set seed.)

Good luck. We have been battling our problem for a couple years and finally have one area nearly cleared; no mature plants and all seedlings pulled. We will tackle the rest of the first year plants this year, and hopefully by 2010 or 2011 the seedbank will be exhausted.

The only good news is that the very early spring, when it's best to tackle the problem, is about three weeks before any other gardening can be done in this part of the country.

OK, it was only last night that I discovered this was garlic mustard. Tonight I came home to an excellent pesto over pasta, cooked by my ever-resourceful hubby, using the garlic mustard, as we had almost no fresh basil. It was great! I'm not saying this is not an invasive weed that still needs to be eradicated, or at least checked, but you might as well eat it while you're getting rid of it.

Here's the recipe my hubby came up with -- the remainder of this post is from him:

For this recipe, you need to pull the plant by the root, because the taproot is one of the ingredients:

Pull a sufficient number of plants to get about a cup of leaves (six or so ought to do it), rip 'em off the stem, wash them thoroughly and set this aside. Then take the taproots, chop up enough to get about three tablespoons, and wash them as well.

Take about four cloves of garlic, chopped, the chopped taproots, the leaves from the plant, about a quarter cup of pecans (you can use pine nuts if you're a traditionalist, but because of the vaguely Southern piquant taste of the leaves, pecans work really well). Toss in about two tablespoons of dried parsley, the same amount of dried basil, the same amount of Pecorino or Romano, and salt and pepper to taste. Dump everything in a food processor or blender. Now pulverize it, drizzling in olive oil as you go until it reaches your desired pesto consistency. (I like mine a little on the light side, which goes better with pasta.) Voila.

By the way, this is not only a delicious way to get rid of an invasive weed, it's also chock full of vitamins A and C.

This can be refrigerated for up to 10 days.