Why you should be cooking with garlic mustard Today's best articles Daily business briefing Solving COVID newsletter Now that it's early spring, I am overjoyed to discover tender garlic mustard, one of the first wild ingredients to sprout from the still-dormant upstate New York landscape. Garlic mustard, Alliaria petiolata, also known as poor man's mustard or Jack-by-the-hedge, is a plant in the mustard (Brassicaceae) family, originally brought to the U.S. from Europe as a garden plant to help mitigate erosion. It is a biennial, sprouting vegetation in its first year, then after overwintering, it produces seeds in spring. Garlic mustard is also an aggressively invasive species, suffocating the biodiversity of native plants. As The Nature Conservancy states, "Because the understory of a forest is so important for insects and other species at the bottom of the food chain, invaders like garlic mustard who emerge earlier than most native plants weaken the entire ecosystem."