Can I eat garlic mustard?

Yes, please eat it all.  Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) is a horribly invasive weed. TPP must make the rounds of our estate two or three times a spring to keep the garlic mustard at bay; it invades from an un-kept preserve next door. It's a biennial taking two seasons to go from seed to seed. And, yes, especially when young the leaves are edible; they have a nice peppery garlicy flavor that would probably go quite well in wilted salad or in a pesto.  A young person asked about this.  They are fascinated with the idea of foraging for edibles. So, why not collect it and eat it?  Basically, it isn't that good that it's worth it.  Think about this. The plant is native to Europe where agriculture has been practiced for a few millenia.  The plant has long been collected as a culinary herb. The really good food plants have been domesticated and are grown at least in some places for food. But not garlic mustard. Our ancestors are telling us something, but by all means collect all the garlic mustard you want. TPP would recommend collecting along a section of a walking/biking trail built on an abandoned railway line. The banks of this trail abound (too weak), are a dense, weedy, morass of garlic mustard, and all these jogger/biker types zoom/zoom-zoom by thinking (?), isn't nature wonderful?  All the botanist sees is a mess of invasive weeds, and enough peppery, garlicy greens to choke the population of Chi-town.  
Understand TPP is not opposed to foraging.  Back in the poor graduate student days TPP foraged the country side for asparagus. Clumps grew along fences in the grassy margins of maize fields, so you could ride your bike along and harvest some spears returning home with a nice veggie for din-dins. The spears were hard to see in the tall grass, so TPP would bend a discarded can (all too common) over the fence to mark the spot when the asparagus shoots were tall and easily seen so you could find the young shoots next spring. This worked well until someone figured out the marking system and foraged earlier. So TPP does not intend to discourage foraging per se, but does have a thing about invasive plants and people's insensitivity to them. One friend says she can no longer walk in woods because she can't stop pulling garlic mustard or honeysuckle seedlings.  

Deforestation and clear cutting

TPP is basically opposed to deforestation and clear cutting.  It's basically a rape nature with a bulldozer mentality. However at times drastic action is needed, and in this case it was lawn that needed mowing, and it involved clear cutting and deforestation. The massive sugar maple had a good crop last year and this year the number of maple seedlings sprouting virtually everywhere is astounding. So simply mowing the lawn amounted to clear cutting of a very young forest. Wish the forest trying to take over our gardens could be removed as easily. To continue the theme, TPP had to patrol the western front of our estate to destroy an illegal immigrant: garlic mustard, which is kindly grown by a neighbor especially for export purposes. Fortunately garlic mustard does pull fairly easily. A visit to these distant regions did reveal that a fringe tree somewhat surrounded by ever embiggering conifers was in glorious full bloom, a delight to both eye and nose.

Pollination success - waiting, waiting.

TPP's apple and pear trees have flowered, and it wasn't the absolute best weather for flowering, and we had a close call the other night with a low temperature near freezing, so now just waiting to see if we have pollination success.  Last year an early spring and a late freeze combined to nuke the entire upper midwest apple crop.  It was grim.  Had to have northern spys shipped in from NY.  It's just a tad to early to judge whether the pollinators did their job or not. Plenty of crab apples were in flower too, so lot's of nearby pollen sources, and no crab apple pollen will not affect the apples, just the apple offspring (seeds).  The pear tree did not flower well, so the display might not have been big enough for good pollination.  Combination of drought and bunnies required redoing most of the raspberry bed this week as well, and this was after giving up on the blue berries.  In the process discovered that the neighbors property adjoining ours is raising a bumper crop of garlic mustard. Each year their seeds repopulate our gardens, so no matter how zealously the Phactors weed, we get more.  Does the military sell surplus flame throwers?  TPP will attempt to widen the weed-free zone along the fence line (on their side!) one way or another.  But guess we're to gardening as Cub fans are to the Cubs, always hopefull, often disappointed.      

Dodged a bullet

Tuesday night's frost warning predictions varied from 28-32 degrees depending upon the source.  Wednesday night's frost warning had a pretty uniform prediction of 28 degrees.  That is more than cold enough to do lots of damage to tender new foliage, so this was a bit worrisome.  A quick survey after Tuesday night only showed some minor frost damage to some hydrangeas, so within our little heat island, it suggested a low temperature of just under 32 F.  Another 2-3 degrees below freezing was possible last night, but a look around this morning suggests, that for us, the 2nd night of frost was a non-event.  Just in case a few garden items were covered.  Most of our gardens are protected by tree crowns and that also seems to help.  Hopefully this will be the last bullet to be dodged this spring, but since it's only April 12th, this is pretty unrealistic.  Just a bit of an interlude will give my Magnolia tripetala a chance to flower.  Out of town the frost could have been more severe.  Last week's frost did no damage in our gardens, nor to all the plants on our prairie study site, with one exception, an invasive bush clover was damaged significantly, which is not a bad thing.  In other news, this looks like a good year for garlic mustard, so our neighbors in our shady neighborhood will have to be encouraged to do some eradication, but like pruning, which is either over done or never done, people seem to be afraid to pull obvious weeds.