eat your weeds

The whole world, including the internets, seems to be covered in garlic mustard right now. While most hardy perennials are just starting to peep out, huge mounds of garlic mustard appear overnight. There are plenty of warnings and alarms online about how evil this plant is, how invasive, how it could potentially ruin forests. I tend to get kind of excited about having wild ginger, as it's also called, growing outside my door, especially after my multiple failed attempts to grow my own ginger fueled by stickers on store-bought ginger telling me it hails all the way from China, even when I've bought it at the health food store! OK, ok, I know wild ginger doesn't taste the same as that ginger, and I will dutifully try to grow ginger again in warm weather.

In the meantime, garlic mustard is edible, and that's why it was introduced here in the first place. Because I'm not especially hardcore about native vs. non-native, I like approach of keeping these babies in control by eating them. Eating garlic mustard, that is, not human babies. It's spicy, like horseradish root.The roots are long, but thin, and I'm way too lazy to prepare them like horseradish. A lot of people seem to make pesto out of the leaves and roots. I'm finding the huge roots useful for adding flavor (and good bacteria) to my nuka bed. Lazy tasty, mmmm.