Garlic Mustard
-
- May
- 2
No, this is not a plant you want. Garlic mustard is a hugely invasive nuisance weed that you need to get out of your garden and out of your yard.
And now is the best time to pull it up, well before it goes to full flower and then throws off its seeds for next year.
Known botanically as Alliaria petiolata, garlic mustard poses a severe threat to native plants and animals for much of the East Coast and Midwest. It outcompetes with spring native plants for light, soil, moisture, space and nutrients.
Garlic mustard will grow anywhere: full sun, full shade, rich loam or poor clay. It becomes particularly aggressive in disturbed soil.
Common names for the plant include hedge garlic, jack-by-the-hedge, poor man’s mustard, jack-in-the-bush, garlic root, garlicwort and mustard root.
The good news is that persistent hand weeding of garlic mustard really does make a difference over a few years. It may pop up in other areas, but it won’t come back strongly in areas where you’ve pulled it consistently over a 2- or 3-year period.
Garlic mustard also comes up fairly easily, especially after a good rain. Get a good grip on the plant low to the ground — you want to make sure you get all of the tap root when you pull it.
Native to Europe, this biennial herb appears as a low-growing groundcover the first year, looking a lot like violets, and then shoots up 2 to 3 feet the second year with clusters of tiny white flowers on top. The triangular to heart-shaped leaves give off an odor of garlic when crushed.
Seed pods begin to appear in late May and may remain on the plant all summer. A single plant can produce thousands of seeds.
Do yourself — and your neighbors — a favor and spend a few minutes the next couple of weekends getting rid of any garlic mustard on your property.
This entry was posted
on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 9:48 am by Bill Cary.
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Bill Cary grew up in Louisville, Ky. His gardening was limited to growing parsley and impatiens on the windowsill of Manhattan walkups until the mid-1990s when he bought a rundown old chicken farm on 8 acres in the Hudson Valley. Now he spends his weekends chasing deer, hacking away at invasive shrubs and vines and wondering why he doesn`t have more meadow and less lawn.
