Turkish Rocket

Before you plant, check whether your state or county regulates Bunias orientalis - Wisconsin lists it as prohibited across most of the state and restricted in Dane, Grant, Green, Iowa, Lafayette and Rock counties. Where it is legal, put it somewhere you will never need to take it back out, well away from pasture, meadow and roadside edges. It anchors on a taproot at least an inch wide in a cluster of roots that is extremely hard to pull or dig out, and it regrows from root cuttings, so a bed you change your mind about is a bed you fight for years.

Check the new leaves as they push up in spring for slug and snail damage, which shows as ragged holes chewed from the leaf margins inward. Established clumps outgrow the damage, but first-year plants can be set back. The tender early growth emerges when slugs and snails are most active and there is little else green to eat, and a small plant has no reserves to replace what it loses.

Any stalk that got past you and opened its yellow flowers should be cut as close to the ground as you can manage, before the warty pods form. Expect to go back through the planting a second time later in summer, because cut plants push new stalks. Each of those little warty fruits carries two to four seeds and the flowers are self-fertile, so a single plant left to finish seeds a wide area without any pollen partner.

Through summer, walk out from the planting and look for seedlings and stray rosettes in field edges, roadsides, meadow and any disturbed or tilled ground. Cut or dig what you find before the seed matures, and plan on two passes over the summer. It invades grasslands, pastures, roadsides and disturbed ground, and it can build monoculture stands in high quality habitat, so escapes are cheapest to stop in their first season before they set the seedbank.

For a stand that has escaped into non-crop ground and is too large to cut or dig, foliar spray 2,4-D or metsulfuron once the stalks bolt but before any flower opens, and always before seed set. If the stand is already in open bloom, do not spray it - cut the stalks to the ground instead and save the spray for the regrowth. Tillage to dislodge the root system is the mechanical alternative where spraying is not appropriate. Both are broadleaf herbicides that move into the deep taproot, which is what a cut stalk never reaches, and treating before seed set stops the stand from banking seed even if the roots take another pass to kill. Spraying at the bolted bud stage also puts the herbicide on full leaf area before the flowers draw pollinators in.

As the flower stalks rise and the bud clusters form, cut them while the buds are still closed and no yellow shows, and cook them like broccoli florets. Young leaves are mild and cabbage-like and can be picked alongside them. The buds are sweetest and most tender before the flowers open, and the leaves turn progressively hotter and coarser as the plant ages into bloom.