Garlic Mustard, Thoughts on Invasive Species

While doing some landscaping this weekend in my back yard, I made two different observations and uploaded them to iNaturalist. One observation was of a plant I found growing near my neighbor's fence. I noticed eight or ten individual plants, ranging from eight to eighteen inches tall, in an area roughly twenty feet wide and five feet deep. Shortly after uploading my observation, a user from California suggested an identification. He thought the plant might be Garlic Mustard, which I later learned is an invasive species here in the United States. After looking at pictures of Garlic Mustard and reading some information through the iNaturalist app, I decided that he was most certainly correct in his identification and suggested the same identification. While viewing iNaturalist on my computer's web browser, I noticed that there was an exclamation mark next to the species name. When I hovered over this marker, the app alerted me that this species was introduced by anthropogenic means (i.e. invasive) and I decided to read up on the plant some more. After learning that Garlic Mustard can be turned into a pesto sauce, I went back outside and pulled all of the plants I could find. I bagged them up and can't wait to try and turn them into something delicious! I think the fact that iNaturalist helped alert me to an invasive species that I then removed from my yard is a very cool result of the information-sharing capacity of the app. By removing the plant and being able to use it in the kitchen so that it doesn't go to waste makes me feel even better about the outcome. This just goes to show how helpful it can be to have people from all over the world, with different levels of experience, help to identify a plant that I otherwise would have totally overlooked. Because of this experience, I have no doubt that next time I run across this species I will be able to identify it with ease. I have always wanted to learn to forage for wild edibles, and this event has helped for fortify this desire. I wonder what type of other unforeseen influences iNaturalist might have on my knowledge and on my areas of interest. I can very much appreciate this learning experience because of the way that it played out.

Posted on 10 May, 2020 14:59 by jearn043