Ooh! Let us know what those are when you figure it out!
I’ve discovered that some of the radish seeds I sowed back in fall have sprouted right now. I first noticed it three weeks ago, and those tiny little seedlings have ignored quite a few snows and drops to 16-degree-ish temperatures at night since then, so I expect they’ll keep living and eventually become full-sized radishes for me. Yay!
The first one reminds me of some kind of water cress. Is it spicy/peppery?
All of those look familiar to me as common weeds which makes sense as we are in basically the same geographic area. I think one of them might be wild mustard but really have little clue. I’ve never bothered with identifying them.
Bottom picture looks like wintercress. It’s common weed and wild edible here. It’s distant relative of brassicas so it tastes little like them too. Leaves can be used in salads and in spring it makes flower stalk that can be used like broccoli and flowers with little yellow flowers that look like rapeseed flowers. It’s slighly spicier and nuttier than broccoli. Very good plant for the hungry gap as it’s one of the first to grow in spring.
The top one is Cardamine, it grows as a weed on compost and soil piles here. It definitely tolerates the weird city composts better than most plant, and holds its green in that sort of black-ashy-woodchip type medium in which other plants do not thrive. Maybe it’s got some herbicide resistance, if city compost’s issue is indeed herbicide residues. I don’t know. It’s edible but I don’t like the taste in large quantities.
Are those spines on the middle one?
The bottom one gives me watercress vibes but that’s not what it is. Looks edible.
I had a significant surprise today! Last spring I planted some wheat, chiddham blanc specifically, and didn’t end up harvesting it in the fall. I’ve been thinking about it the last couple days, lamenting that I didn’t at least grab enough to get my seed back out of it. There’s no way, in a world where ravens dig up all my corn and have really serious screaming rolling on the ground fights over my pig food and voles eat every scrap of cambium off any tree less than 20 years old, that wheat right out in the open would still be there, right?
Well, I trekked up there in the knee-deep snow this evening and the wheat was pretty much all there. A couple bits of husk and awn were scattered on the snow, a few vole holes surfaced there, there was a raven wingprint in the snow, but most of the stalks were intact. I hadn’t brought a knife or snips up with me, not expecting to see anything, so I managed to wrench off a good full handful of stalks, one by one (they’re strong and not brittle! And obviously the grain doesn’t shatter) and then came back down. I’ll go back up there later and collect the rest, but I got my seed back (assuming they ripened enough before our several hard freezes).
I wonder if this is the miracle of awns, the miracle of being planted next to corn (the unripe corn was probably easier and tastier than wheat?) or some other thing, but it’s pretty neat. Now we’ll see if any of it grows.
The first and last photos look very much like Barbarea vulgaris to me, aka wintercress.
Feral B. vulgaris is growing all over the place in my area this winter.
Edit: Cardamine hirsuta also seems like a possible match, per Greenie’s post. I looked at some examples here, and I see small hairs on the edge of my cress’s leaves, so at least some of this here may be C. hirsuta.
Wow, that’s great! I’m happy for you! So you were not only able to get your seed back, you were able to get seeds that may be a little bit bird-resistant! 
Amazing! My money’s on the awns, but whatever the case congrats!!
I’ve been trying to establish watercress from seed, without much luck. Driving to town this morning I noticed a group of floating green plants in the ‘spray zone’ of the state highway, and I was thrilled to discover it is watercress. Woo!! Right about this time of year is brownest/deadest that foliage gets, which makes it easier to spot plants that are still green.
Woohoo! That works out perfectly!
Watch out with that stuff. If cows are closeby it can get you liverflukes through watersnails. I grow it quite succesfully in differing ponds. Sometimes it flourishes a year later it looks gone, then it’s back again. Odd stuff.
For eating i stick to wintercress or landcress which is a great source of vit C / minerals and add that to pumpkinsoup. Hot radish bite to it. It’s like an opposing taste.
Practically wild, survivor.
Thank you for this timely advice. We have no cows nearby but there are other animals around that I need to think about when I select sites at our place to transplant.
The first is hairy bittercress. Add it to your salad before it flowers.
My surprise was how well frost seeding peas works for me. I’m trying with spinach now.
Second is the observation that winter grown salad does much better under plastic. No irrigation.
Oh, cool! Frost seeding is essentially what I did with my peas that I planted a few weeks ago. I didn’t know there was a specific name for it. I just went out to the garden, chucked them around randomly on the bare soil, and checked back a week later. It’s been three weeks, and they all still seem to be there, all of them look swollen, and most of them have little sprouts peeking out! I’m pleased.
I’m always so curious about folks who can put out big visible seeds like that without birds coming to eat them! Do you have many birds in your garden at all?
Barely any! We have lots of feral cats in my neighborhood, including one that was abandoned by a previous family who lived in our house. We don’t want pets in our house, but we’re perfectly happy to have her wandering through our yard all the time, and our kids love petting her. She seems to feed herself just fine, and so do several other feral cats in our neighborhood. So we have very few rodents and very few birds. Speaking as a gardener, I find those cats a delightful part of our environment. 
They do get a bunch of voles, and the black one looks meaningfully at crows, but maybe because I have big birds and that I’m on a ton of migration routes for small birds (so I get hundreds to thousands at a time) these guys don’t make a big difference. Maybe I need to kick them out of the house more. 
Hee hee hee! It probably makes a big difference whether they’re fed by humans or not. From what I understand, pet cats are usually full enough that they don’t kill much in the way of rodents or birds. (Some do kill some because of instincts, but many don’t even do that.) We have cats in our neighborhood who are truly feral and don’t get fed (much) by humans.
My neighbor also told me that it makes a difference whether they were taken from their mothers young or not. Kittens learn how to mouse from their mothers, and they’re routinely taken away from their mothers when they’re only a few weeks old. If you want mousers, you need a mother who’s a mouser, and you need to let the kittens stay with her until they’re about eight weeks old, and successfully catching mice on their own. If you do that, you’ll have cats who can feed themselves and keep down garden pests.
My next-door neighbor wound up doing that when her pet cat got pregnant thanks to the feral tom in our neighborhood. She kept the kittens until they could mouse, and then took them out to her uncle’s farm. He told her he wants all the feral mousers he can get, as an organic method of pest control, so he’d love to have kittens dropped off on his land anytime she has some she doesn’t want to keep, just as long as they’re old enough to know how to mouse for themselves.
Well-fed pet cats often aren’t very good mousers, but feral cats often are. It’s probably similar to coddling garden plants versus teaching them to take care of themselves. Cats make wonderful pets, but they also make wonderful ecosystem-regulating livestock. Which of course makes perfect sense. That’s what cats were originally domesticated for!
