A lot of my favorite wild foods grow in Springtime. I often have a fresh picked, wild salad from my backyard at dinner time. One of my favorite wild greens is garlic mustard. I love it's slightly bitter, garlicy flavor and it's great served with dandelion greens, violets, and fiddleheads. Delicious! Now is a good time to pick garlic mustard, it is in flower and easier to recognize. It gets more bitter as the season progresses, and will be gone by June. As always, don't pick and eat anything unless you are sure you have identified it correctly.
Here is some more information on garlic mustard:
Garlic mustard is a cool season biennial herb with stalked, triangular to heart-shaped, coarsely toothed leaves that give off an odor of garlic when crushed. First-year plants appear as a rosette of green leaves close to the ground. Rosettes remain green through the winter and develop into mature flowering plants the following spring. Flowering plants of garlic mustard reach from 2 to 3-½ feet in height and produce buttonlike clusters of small white flowers, each with four petals in the shape of a cross.
Garlic mustard is very invasive and poses a severe threat to native plants and animals in forest communities in much of the eastern and midwestern U.S. Many native widlflowers that complete their life cycles in the springtime (e.g., spring beauty, wild ginger, bloodroot, Dutchman's breeches, hepatica, toothworts, and trilliums) occur in the same habitat as garlic mustard. Once introduced to an area, garlic mustard outcompetes native plants by aggressively monopolizing light, moisture, nutrients, soil and space. Wildlife species that depend on these early plants for their foliage, pollen, nectar, fruits, seeds and roots, are deprived of these essential food sources when garlic mustard replaces them.
I found the information above at the National Park Service website. Check it out if you want to read more about garlic mustard.
National Park Service - Garlic Mustard
