Mustard: Everyone’s favorite (edible) weed

It’s wildflower time: the hills are painted with yellow, and newspapers print pictures of orange poppies, blue lupines, and yellow (uh-oh) mustard. I like spring color, but I wince at all those mustard flowers, because it means we have a long way to go to restore our hillsides.

Many of our parks and preserves are land recovering from a century of cattle and sheep grazing. Instead of native vegetation, the landscape is dominated by introduced grasses and weeds. One of these is Black Mustard, beloved by many because of its exuberant flowering, but still a weed.

Biologists consider these plants undesirable because they crowd out native vegetation and have no value for wildlife, which can’t eat them or use them for nesting. Even worse, they take up soil nutrients, living space, and water needed by the native plants. Because nothing eats them, these exotic plants have an advantage over the native vegetation.

Restoration of the thousands of acres of mustard would take years and be very expensive. There’s no money in park budgets for this. There’s got to be another way.

Charlotte Clarke of Fullerton College used to teach a course every spring on the identification and preparation of edible weeds. She published a great little guidebook entitled, “Eat The Weeds.”

Black mustard is an annual that first appears as a small rosette of leaves. Years ago, I gathered those very first tender leaves for my in-laws, who enjoyed them in salads or as cooked greens. I suggest we make eating wild mustard trendy. Every spring, about February, when park rangers and preserve managers notice those first tiny mustard plants, they’d activate the mustard gatherers.

It’s important to get them early. Wild plants produce intensely bitter substances to discourage grazing animals; only those first few leaves are palatable.

The rules would be simple: Gather all you want, as long as you destroy the root at the same time. Luckily for the harvesters, mustard, being a weed, grows preferentially on the disturbed sides of trails. No heavy hiking required. After a morning of easy, enjoyable harvesting, go home and whip up mustard leaf soufflés, mustard mixed green salads, duck with mustard leaves, etc. After a few years of this, wild mustard would be so chic, it would appear on upscale menus and in plastic bags at Trader Joe’s. Commercial harvesters would buy permits from the parks. The mustard acreage would shrink, and the follow-up restoration would have paid for itself.

But what about the flowers? Wouldn’t we miss those yellow hillsides? Well, no. Remember, the introduced grassland and weeds replaced the coastal sage scrub, which happens to have a dynamite yellow-flowering shrub, California Encelia.

I used to call it the Van Gogh plant, because the flowers are yellow daisies with brown centers (botanically, the ray flowers are yellow, and the disk flowers are brown). For years I looked out at a south-facing hillside across from my kitchen window, across Canyon Acres Drive. In April and May, depending on the weather, that hillside was ablaze with the intense yellow of those gorgeous, and native, flowers.