Wanted, Dead or Alive (Preferably Dead): Garlic Mustard!

Leah (on the left) and our teenage volunteer (on the right) design a fantastic poster to educate the public about Garlic Mustard, a weedy menace that threatens natural biodiversity in our green spaces.

On the second 2022 stewardship day in Ben Nobleman Park, we were a team on a mission. In addition to caring for our fruit trees and pollinator garden, our goal was to hunt down and destroy any garlic mustard plants we found growing in our park.

That may sound harsh for a group of fruit-loving garden volunteers, but garlic mustard is an invasive herb that is spreading through our forests. It establishes itself quickly and releases chemicals into the soil that prevent the growth of native plants.

If we want to protect our environment, it’s essential we all play a role in removing this aggressive plant from our gardens and parks.

Tess and Dan remove garlic mustard from a shrub bed in the park where it is starting to take over.

So Tess and Dan took it upon themselves to find and remove this weed (which is actually tasty and makes a great pesto). And Leah assigned our teenage volunteer the important job of creating a poster that would teach park visitors what garlic mustard is and how to identify it.

Our teenage volunteer created this poster to help park visitors identify garlic mustard so that they can either eat it (it makes great pesto) or dig it out and destroy it so it doesn’t continue to spread!

Zeny, Susan, Rael, Leah and Olivia focused on other orchard jobs including weeding around the fruit trees to prepare for mulching in a few weeks. And Annie, who recently completed OrchardPeople.com’s Certificate in Fruit Tree Care course, practiced her pruning skills by cutting back the dogwoods in our pollinator garden.

Annie’s job was to trim the red-twigged and yellow-twigged dogwood.

The highlight of the day was when Lynn came to visit the team! Many of us hadn’t seen her for months and it was fantastic to have her back in the garden with us! We’ll be back in the park in two weeks to continue our volunteer work. Want to join us? Send an email to Leah at growingforgreen (at) gmail.com and we’ll sign you up!

Lynn (on the right) comes to visit the team.

Susan Poizner is one of the volunteers for The Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard in Toronto. She is the creator of the fruit tree care education website OrchardPeople.com.  Susan is the author of four fruit tree care books including Grow Fruit Trees Fast: A Beginner’s Guide to a Healthy Harvest in Record Time. She is also the host of the Orchard People podcast and an ISA Certified Arborist.