Garlic Mustard Foraging and Recipe

[Music] I'm Jen Houston and I'm one of the board members of the rock fall foundation the mission of the rock fall foundation is to support and promote environmental education and conservation in the lower Connecticut River Valley this series is called nature's supermarket the focus of this series is to highlight some of the edible plants that you can pick right here in our own backyards and our own Woodlands and enjoy at home I hope you enjoy it so I'd like to introduce you to our special plant and then after we give a little introduction and a little information then we'll bring it into the kitchen and we'll make some pesto out of it so the plant that I'd like you to meet is none other than garlic mustard garlic mustard is a member of the Brassica family which means officially that it is a mustard its scientific name is Ali Arya Hedy lotta petty a lotta which um a liam is the word for onion basically so I think it's like onion like or garlic like and petia lotta well petioles are the little little connectors that attach the leaves to the stem and a lot of means heck there's a lot of them so it so anyway garlic mustard is an invasive species here in North America so we think that it probably came over in the early 1800s from Great Britain by the settlers and they brought this plant with them because it is so delicious and it is super nutritious but on the flip side it's really doing a lot of damage to our native woodlands here in Connecticut you can find garlic mustard on the roadsides in disturbed places and now more and more it's spreading into our backyards and our woodlands and one of the reasons why it's so bad is because garlic mustard is dominating all of our native plants in its first year growth it has a little very short rosette kind of thing and when it's young like that and the garlic mustard secretes a chemical called Sinag Rijn into the ground and Sinag Rijn disrupts the growth of our native plants and it disrupts the growth of the mycorrhizal fungi in the ground so it literally kills other plants around it as well as just out competing them and becoming so dense that that other native plants can't grow so the garlic mustard is a biannual now it's a biennial and that means that each plant lives for two years so the first year growth is a just a short little plant that never gets a flower on it until the second year and so these that I have in my hands are the second year growth and they're just starting to flower because it's it's some still spring here and the flowers are white and they have four little little petals in the shape of a cross and once the flowers finish then it'll send out its little seed pods and these garlic mustard seeds are so plentiful one plant can make as many as six hundred to seven thousand seeds so a square yard of densely populated garlic mustard can have as many as 17 to 24 thousand seeds landing on the ground so no wonder it's so dominating right so usually when we harvest plants out of the woods we take care not to pick too many or if there's only a few of a certain variety we don't pick any at all but for garlic mustard take all you want because we want to get rid of this stuff it's it's it's really something that you don't have to feel like you're have to be careful with so garlic mustard is best to eat when it's young once it starts flowering it becomes a little bit bitter but this is still perfectly good to eat and all parts of this are edible the route is super super flavourful kind of like horseradish so it's really really strong and the seeds can even be made into spices so well we're gonna use the leaves for our pesto so we'll just pick a bunch and then we'll bring it to the kitchen [Music] all right so we are back from foraging and we are ready to make some pesto so we have our main ingredient garlic mustard I have my food processor here and I pre measured everything so it would be a lot more up streamlined so the first thing we'll doing with will throw in the nuts I'm also adding garlic some people make the garlic mustard pesto without garlic because it already tastes garlicky but I have this little spring garlic coming up in my garden and it's all growing in the Rose that I want to walk in because it's just all over the place so it was a good excuse for me to get rid of some of it so and it goes plus I love garlic good for good for the breath so I had mentioned that garlic mustard is packed with vitamins and it's very very healthy to eat matter of fact garlic mustard gram for gram has three to four times the amount of vitamin C as an orange as I say as I squeeze this lemon so this is my kind of cooking very easy I'm too busy running around to cook very much luckily I have backups I'm in that department okay so you want to come have a look that was very basic it's easy and here we have some garlic mustard pesto now I made the vegan version because my family is vegan but I'm sure there's plenty of versions that call for Parmesan cheese rather than nutritional yeast well welcome your comments below thank you very much I hope you enjoyed this little segment on garlic mustard

Channel: The Rockfall Foundation

Views: 14,412

Keywords: garlic mustard, foraging, edible plants, invasive plants, cooking, recipe, pesto

Id: hJAKt5G5iXA

Length: 9min 4sec (544 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2020