The Garlic Mustard Wars

I was trying to decide whether to write about the incredible fantastic display of structural undergarments through the ages I visited yesterday at the Bard Graduate Center (86th & CPW - oh, yes, Gentle Reader, I do still get into Manhattan, and I don't even have to ask the locals "Which way is uptown?" - at least, not yet.) The exhibition, called "Fashioning the Body," is well worth writing about, and maybe I'll take it on tomorrow if the weather is not too beautiful.  Luckily for you, my little Chiclets, today is hazy, hot and humid, even up here in the sticks, and with the best will and the most finely-honed case of Gardener's OCD you ever saw, I couldn't bring myself to spend any more times out of doors. If the weather's nice tomorrow - different story, and, as Tigger would say, "TTFN!"

However, since the latest thing on my mind is always, "What did I do this morning?" I will refresh myself with the tall glass of iced coffee I had the forethought to refrigerate before going outside to get all hot and dirty while I write about how the garden thing is going.  The short answer is, "Quite well."

I won't bore you with a detailed list of everything I've planted, or of all the curious things I've dug up in the process. Suffice to say that I like planting flowers, and that the former homeowners liked to throw vodka bottles into the shrubbery, where they thought the evidence of their shenanigans would be buried in oblivion forever. At one point my spade struck a flat, white, longish box-like thing and I thought, "Huzzah! They buried the family diamonds and, thanks to all that vodka, they forgot to dig them up before they moved!" But it turned out to be a clay drainpipe, and that was the end of my fantasy that there would surely be some kind of rich reward in store for the wonderful person (me) who was doing all this work on the neglected garden.  The rich reward turned out to be the soil itself, which had lain under a carpet of gently decaying leaves that were never raked for decades and had grown fine and moist and fecund, bursting with nutrients that are making my peonies and my Solomon's Seal sit up and take notice.

You will not, perhaps, be surprised to learn that we now have the fattest, happiest robins in the county.  As Mary Lennox discovered in Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic tale of Gardenmania, robins love being around gardeners, because we dig up all those plump, juicy worms and succulent grubs.  Saves them a great deal of trouble - all they have to do is dart down from the tree and pounce.

I have also dug up literally yards of poison ivy, which, in my zeal and innocence, I did not know was poison ivy when I first began yanking it out.  Luckily, I always wear gardening gloves, due to incurable squeamishness (see above, "worms and grubs.")  I now know exactly what P.I. looks like, and I have to say, so far I have been extraordinarily lucky, for while I continue to ruthlessly exterminate it wherever I find it, I have not yet broken out in the classic unbearable itchy rash. I suppose if I keep it up, eventually my luck will run out, but thus far my body has not seemed to recognize the nasty stuff for what it is and is not, at this writing, screaming in protest that I should stay away from that stuff!!!! (Yes, I know - don't burn the plant after you pluck it out.  I looked up all the safety precautions online, never fear.)

The other thing I've gone after with a vengeance is the garlic mustard.

Now, I had never heard of garlic mustard, and would have assumed it's something one enquires for in the condiment section at Zabar's, or perhaps at Agata & Valentina if Zabar's has run out. An Upper West Side friend with a country house in Connecticut is also a Gardenmania Gal, and she mentioned having spent an exhausting morning ripping out the garlic mustard making incursions onto her property, describing the stuff as "An evil, invasive weed my stupid ancestors brought over from Europe because they thought there wasn't going to be anything to eat." So I asked Mr. Google, and horrors! - there was a picture of it, and we had it by the acre.  And yes - theoretically, you could encounter this insidious variation on Audrey in an 8 oz. container for $12 at a a high-end NYC foodie emporium and think to yourself, "Wow, garlic mustard pesto - how interesting, I shall certainly strike the Originality Gong at the next PTA pot-luck with that slathered onto my penne!"

And yes - you can, in fact, cook with the stuff.  That is, if you can stand the sight of it after you've pulled up dozens of huge plastic trash bags full and discovered that it does, indeed, smell strongly of garlic, although not at all like mustard.  My husband, who, being of sound mind, has not pulled up a single stalk, expresses mild interest in its culinary properties and keeps telling me to bring back some of the young, tender ones because that's what the online recipes recommend.  I keep saying, "Sure, next time I absolutely will," and then I get so infuriated by the utter ubiquity of this ghastly plague of a plant and the fact that no matter how much of it I pull out by the roots, there's always more surging up right behind it, that the last thing I want to do is eat it.  So I stuff it into the plastic bags, willy-nilly, and leave it out for our Kindly Carting Man to take away twice a week, probably to his bewilderment because up to now we were a single-garbage-bag-producing household except on major holidays.

The thing that pisses me off the most about the garlic mustard is - well, actually, there are so many things I can't decide.  For one thing, it's very sneaky and in its infant stage likes to hide behind the poison ivy and then spring out at you a year later (it's a biennial) as a towering, stinky plant-thing with unattractive little white flowers at the tippy-top that are going to seed all over the place and make lots more of it. According to the King County (WA) informational website on "Noxious Weeds" (Ob-noxious, I'd call it!):

  It is difficult to control once it has reached a site; it can cross-pollinate or self-pollinate, it has a high seed production rate, it out competes native vegetation and it can establish in a relatively stable forest understory. It is not eaten by local wildlife or insects.  It can grow in dense shade or sunny sites. The fact that it is self fertile means that one plant can occupy a site and produce a seed bank. Plant stands can produce more than 62,000 seeds per square meter to quickly out compete local flora, changing the structure of plant communities on the forest floor. Garlic mustard is also allelopathic, producing chemicals that inhibit the growth of other plants and mychorrizal fungi needed for healthy tree growth and tree seedling survival.

Got that? One plant can have 62,000 babies all by itself - no co-parent needed - plus, it's not fussy about sun, shade, or swamp; plus, it crowds out and deliberately poisons the native plants that were happily minding their own business before this interloper came along to behave like a crew of hipsters swarming through Williamsburg.  On top of which - heu, miserere mei! - the deer won't eat it, having too much common sense and being far too busy snapping up the native plants that the garlic mustard hasn't strangled.

So I have become a one-woman army on an Anti Garlic Mustard Crusade.  Every morning when I walk the dog, I fill up two big black plastic bags with the Noxious Weed from along the roadside.  It is a losing battle I am fighting, and I know it.  In garlic mustard, I may finally have found the one thing stubborner than myself. But I shall press on, muttering to myself with savage exultation as I thrust the dangling S-shaped roots into the bag, "Ha! That's the end of your propagating ways, you nasty trull!"