Garlic Mustard – The Garden Lady

Photo taken from website calledÂ Straight from the Farm

TheGardenLady received this question from Charna.

I think I have this little bugger in my flowerbeds and garden. I really really need to know what the roots look like. I keep pulling up these large carrot type roots that are very often doubled and remind me of what ginsing must look like, and can be rather large clumps. Do you have a picture ofthe root for a mustard garlic weed?

It is so much easier to identify a plant when it is growing above ground when you see the leaves than trying to identify a plant from its roots. And it helps the most for identifying purposes to look at the flower of the plant, if it has flowers.

Garlic mustard is an easy plant to identify when one sees the leaves the first year before it has flowers and also when it has flowers from both the sight and the smell. (see here)

Continue reading “The root of mustard garlic weed”

Garlic Mustard by archangelm

Another weed that plagues my garden and yard is yet another of the weeds that were introduced in North America. This one was introduced in the 1860s as a culinary herb and for medicinal purposes. However, once outside of Europe it became an invasive species. This weed has a number of common names, but the most common name where I live is garlic mustard, Alliaria petiolata. Garlic mustard, in the mustard family, also became an invasive weed in Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Australia and New Zealand. In Europe as many as 69 species of insects including the larve of some Lepidoptera (butterfly and moth)species feast on garlic mustard, but in other areas of the world garlic mustard has no insect predator. So Garlic mustard, an edible plant for some, has become a noxious weed.

It is a biennial- which means that it takes two years to flower and set seed. Because the first year the leaf pattern is so pretty, when TheGardenLady first saw the plant she let it grow. Unfortunately it looks unattractive when it sends up the tiny flowers. And its leaves smell like garlic and the taproot smells like horseradish.

Continue reading “More on Weeds – Garlic mustard”