Groundsel and bitter cress, blooming together
Bitter cress and groundsel are blooming and groundsel is
seeding all over our valley about 2 months early, in January, indeed, before
Christmas. They usually start seeding in
March. You won’t get a better chance to
eliminate them from your yard than the next few weeks—though a few plants can
sprout and bloom all summer, right up to late fall.
Young bitter cress, close up, abut 2 inches wide
While bitter cress
is blooming, it is relatively easy to see by its tiny white four-petal flowers,
though the smallest plants are not obvious; some are as tiny as a half-inch
wide and 1.5 inches tall, fully seeded out.
The largest are 6” wide across the basal leaves with numerous stalks up
to 18 inches tall seeded out. They are
easiest to pull when they have started to develop seed pods.
Just before they bloom, the larger plants are good to eat as
a hot, bitter mustard green. They are
small, but softer and juicier than most mustards, good in a salad. But don’t let them seed out; they are a
nuisance.
Seeded bitter cress, popped out and ugly.
They become a nearly invisible green mist when all the
flowers are finished, but as they turn yellow and dry, they become an eyesore,
and pop their seeds up to three feet in all directions at the slightest
disturbance of the pods. By this time,
seed control is impossible; all one can do is pull the dry stalks and resolve
to do better next year.
Groundsel, blooming and seeding in a ditch
Groundsel is also blooming right now, quickly blowing out
and spreading to your neighbors’ yards or from them. It is a miniature wild
lettuce and not pretty, up to a foot tall, with squared-off leaves; the flowers
are yellow, do not open fully, bending over while they are in bloom,
straightening as they make seed. It is
the first blowing weed of the season, blooming in yards and empty lots all over
town. It’s often easy to pull, but like
other wild lettuce, sticks hard in hard ground.
Cutting it under its crown, in the soil beneath where the leaves grow, will kill it.
Dandelions
are also blooming and seeding about
2 months early. A famous gardener once said that if
dandelions were rare and hard to grow, they would be a prized flower. Their dead-heads don’t even look bad, and
they can be tasty greens before they bloom—but once buds even start to form in
the base, they turn quite bitter.
Dandelions are equally hard to pull before and after
blooming: not easy at all unless your
soil is loose from generous mulching with compost or leaves. With big perennial tap roots like these, it’s
best to stick a shovel in next to the root, loosen, and pull.
Gardening is growing plants where you want them to grow, not
where they happen to land. Many a pretty
flower or edible plant shows itself to be a weed unless kept under tight
control, and that goes double for flowers that cast their seeds to the wind.
Revised Jan-Feb 2015 issue, online at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com
and at the Mail Center, 305 NE 6th
Gardening
is easy if you do it naturally. Litter
is tagging, marking the territory of the disorderly.
Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener 541-955-9040 rycke@gardener.com
