Disturbed Earth: Sweet and Piquant

[ritaxis]

The apple orchards on Calabasas road are blooming -- not the trees, the ground: acid yellow sourgrass and bright yellow mustard. The mustard is the same mustard as you buy in the jar in the store (that is to say the mustard is several of the same species -- there's pages and pages of them in Jepson alone). Roadsides are blooming in honey-scented alyssum and ceanothus.
The garden writer in the Sentinel today called ceanothus "the queen of disturbed earth." Wherever there's a fire or a landslide, ceanothus is one of the pioneering plants, and it serves the land well: its roots prevent further erosion, and there's some indication they also fix nitrogen. It acts as a nursery for trees (as does poison oak, another member of the disturbed earth oligarchy).
Disturbed earth is what we are in California. We are the mustard, immigrant and feeling native, bright and piquant and pushy, urban and rural without distinction.

Okay, that's kind of pretentious. Oh well.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

My brother, when much younger, ate a mustard flower to see if it tasted like the mustard one gets in a jar.

My mother panicked a bit, and called the poison control center, who had no idea about this and put in a call to their expert, who called back a half-hour later to say that he didn't have any confirmation but thought it was probably ok, and that if my brother wasn't showing any ill symptoms by then, he'd be alright.

Sometime much later, when I asked my brother about it, he said that, yeah, it did taste a bit like mustard.

Are they the same plants as mustard greens, too, or are those something different?

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Oh, they're all the same. There's probably a poisonous brassica somewhere, but I haven't met one. But all the mustards are brassica sp -- brassica nigra or brassica rapa or, in the case of mustard greens, brassica juncea. But you can eat very very young wild mustard as greens (it gets tough and rasty pretty quick) Most of the things that are cauliflower-broccoli-cabbage-etc are brassica oleracea, but some are other things, or hybrids with other things, or are confusing.

Brassicaceae is the family to have for dinner.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Ceanothus - I *knew* there was a reason it tries t take over my garden. What it said on the label and the sheer speed with which it grows here are *not* compatible.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Maybe ceanothus is the invasive exotic where you are? The Pampas Grass of elsewhere?