Edible Food Forest: Winter Cress
Channel: Rosemarie Vrancia
Date: 2019-04-06

Transcript:

A spring favorite in the Edible Food Forest is common Winter Cress (Barbarea vulgaris).

Another common name for Winter Cress is Yellow Rocket, evocative of its many tiny yellow blooms covering a cone shaped flower head.
Yellow rocket is a mustard native to Eurasia that was introduced long ago and today is found across North America.

Family: Brassicaceae is commonly known as the mustards. With over 3500 members, this family includes some of our favorite vegetables such as broccoli, kale, and cabbage.

Commonly called “creasies” in days-of-old, winter cress is a superb potherb that has been picked and eaten for generations. It is so popular that commercial canning companies have been known to market it as a canned vegetable. Common in fields, gardens and waste places, winter cress starts from seed late in the summer and develops a rosette of dark green, five-lobed leaves in the fall. It grows remarkably well during warm periods of winter and is ready for harvest and eating in March. Mature winter cress is rather bitter; this problem can be avoided by gathering it when young or mixing it with other greens.

Description: A leafy, much-branched weed to 2 feet tall. Flowers many, crowded, bright yellow, with the typical mustard-family configuration of 4 petals in a crosslike formation, about 3/8 inch across. Blooms April–June. Leaves featherlike, the terminal section oval or circular and much larger than the sections below; the lower leaves on long petioles; the stem leaves often sessile (stalkless). The fruit a long seedpod (technically, a silique); these form at the bottom of the cluster as new flowers open at the tips of the flower stalks.

Size: Height: to 2 feet.

Occurs in cultivated and fallow fields and pastures, on stream banks, along roadsides and railroads, in waste places, and in a variety of open, disturbed areas. A native of Europe and Asia that is widely naturalized in North America, it has been here so long that there are historic records of Cherokees using it medicinally.
A variety of insects, including ants, bees, and butterflies harvest nectar and pollen from the flowers. Several butterfly and moth species use plants in the mustard family as food plants, laying their eggs on the leaves, which the emerging caterpillars eat.