I am planting the last of my space. I have some “ yellow mustard spice seeds from the Buffalo seed Company. I also live in the Mojave desert of Southern California and wild mustard is everywhere most of the time. Does anyone happen to know the relationship between these two? Should I have been eating the greens off of the weed mustard I’ve been pulling out? If I don’t want an even stronger force of mustard everywhere out there, maybe I don’t want to plant more of these seeds? Thanks in advance.
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Greetings from the other side of the mountain! I think one of our students is in your neck of the woods. He’s a physics major trying to breed the world’s best cactus fruit on the side.
My understanding is that all of our brassicas can get crossed up with wild mustards and at the very least diligent roguing out of offspring that are trying to go feral should be part of every saver and breeder of brassicas of all sorts. Unfortunately, letting our tamer varieties pollinate their wild cousins isn’t an effective means of improving the whole neighborhood.
According to my seed saving manual, caging or bagging several plants together and including some pollinator insects in the bag is the gold standard for avoiding contamination. A decent, easier (but still not trivial) strategy is to surround your garden with a tall hedge of some sort to keep in-and-out trips from the insects to a minimum.
But I don’t think you need to worry about making the wild mustard population much larger.
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On this side of the mountain, we’ve accidentally discovered that rapini x Tatsoi makes a really good summer green. It’s pleasant to eat fresh even in September when the thermometer says 110.