They are growing in my flower bad in my front yard, i keep them contained to the bed. They are pretty early bloomers.

How can you be so certain they are contained? They easily spread to roadsides, woodland edges, and your neighbors' yards. It's a noxious weed. You should get rid of it.

While walking on our county road with a friend, we noticed this flower blooming in the ditch alongside the road. Have never noticed it before.

5/13/11 These are just starting to open. There should be a lot open soon.

We have this around where I live. It's also known as Wintercress and it's not really a bad thing to have around. The leaves only (before flowering) are mainly used as food, for salads, and as a pot herb, or fried, and it's high in vitamin C and minerals. It's also used as a bitter medicinal tea to stimulate appetite, purify and strengthen blood (the Cherokee Indians practiced this), for coughs, and as a diuretic. Caution is advised in eating the raw plant, only small amounts 1 tbls. chopped leaves or less. Make sure you only consume from plants that are grown in pure clean soil because wintercress has an amazing ability to store contaminates, even pesticides, from the soil or water it grows in. There's an abundance of information about it's medicinal and edible uses if you Google the scientific name.

I can't really get very excited about its benefits to humans when I see it choking roadsides everywhere I go, like wild parsnip does in SE Minnesota. Please feel free to rid our landscape of yellow rocket, as it is an invasive pest that is spreading.

Found some of this in my back yard as I was mowing this am. It was a bit smaller than the ID specs but, in northern MN there shouldn't be any yellow flowers out there this time of year (on dry ground) that are native plants so I started looking it up to see what it was.

This plant is not on the prohibited noxious weed list, nor is it on the restricted noxious weed list.

It is only on the secondary noxious weed list which means that a county, if it so chooses, can add it to the list of prohibited or restricted noxious weeds. People can grow, import it, do whatever they like with it as long as their county doesn't view it as a problem. That is done for species that in some local environments can turn into real problems but usually are OK, like this one.

You're throwing out the baby with the bathwater if you confound the two types of list.

Jane, based on your other comments, you seem to have a fondness for invasive plants. I'm not really sure what point you are trying to make citing noxious weed lists, however, you may not be aware that "noxious weeds" are strictly an agricultural label, not an ecological one.

The Minnesota Dept of Agriculture regulates the noxious weeds in Minnesota. They are not an environmental agency so they make no consideration as to environmental factors, only agricultural factors. They are also a regulatory agency, not an enforcement or control agency.

Regardless of what you personally think of any particular plant, non-natives are killing our ecosystems more and more every year. Yellow rocket is now thick along every roadside I travel. It worries me that it and other weeds are allowed to run amok like this. Do you ever think that your children and their children won't know the beauty of a healthy native plant community because the only thing left will be weeds? I wonder if we as a community will ever open our eyes and see the damage plants like this are causing. Can we do anything to stop this destruction?