Battle Wild Onions: If You Can't Beat 'em, Eat 'em!

I remember the springtime battles my father waged at our modest Whitnel home.  Before the grass in our yard began to green, his nemeses would shoot up, their prolific long leaves waving in the late winter breeze, taunting him.  No matador's red cape ever enraged a bull as thoroughly as the wild onions' appearance bothered Daddy.  He enlisted my brother and me in his futile quest to remove them from the lawn.  We dug the small bulbs from the earth and tossed them into buckets, unleashing the pungent fragrance that made Dale and me wrinkle our noses.  Finally, we dumped the offending weeds in a pile, far from the lawn, only to see new ones emerge within days.  If only we had eaten them . . .

Tiny wild onion bulbs pack a lot of flavor

It's not as if my family did not enjoy wild edibles.  Blackberries, raspberries, strawberries and Japanese wineberries were seasonal treats and my mother processed the extra fruit into jams and jellies and stored bags of fresh fruit in our freezer.  My grandmother always made poke (polk) salad in the spring and swore by its powers as a health tonic.  In the fall, we enjoyed wild persimmons that puckered our mouths before frost sweetened them and we gathered buckets of black walnuts.  Dale and I would remove the outer hulls, staining our hands with dark juice and by the time Mama made her famous black walnut chocolate cake, we forgot about that unpleasant job.  No, we enjoyed many foraged foods, but for some reason, we never ate wild onions.

Wild garlic, allium vineale, and a close cousin of wild onion, allium canadense, grow edible leaves and bulbs.  Wild garlic is distinguishable from wild onion in that its leaves are round and hollow, while wild onion leaves are flat and solid.  Small bulbs pack a wallop of flavor that intensifies as the season progresses.  For the mildest onion/garlic flavor, harvest as soon as plants appear.  Use the leaves as you would chives and add the bulbs to any dish that incorporates onion or garlic.

Two cultivated heirloom garlic bulbs are to left, the right side one is wild

At Heart & Sole Gardens, our wild garlic plants are huge, compared to those that grow at our home, but far smaller than two heirloom varieties we cultivate.  Despite the diminutive size, the wild bulbs' flavor is much stronger than the cultivated plants and just a little added to a dish makes it fragrant and flavorful.

Wild creasy and dandelion greens are delicious cooked with wild onions

If you do not use chemicals on your lawn and wild onions are part of your landscape, why not bring some into your kitchen and celebrate a delicious victory?

Wild Greens and Onion Salad

Boil two eggs, peel and chop.

*In a large skillet, fry 2 strips bacon until crispy.  Remove bacon and add 1/4 cup wild onions, whole if small and chopped if large, to the hot fat.  Briefly toss to coat veg and cook until translucent, no more than 2 minutes.  Add four cups fresh dandelion and creasy greens, washed, dried and chopped, to the hot skillet.  Toss to combine and cook until greens wilt, but retain bright green color, about 1-3 minutes.  Season to taste with salt, a few grinds of black pepper and a dash of red pepper flakes.  Pour mixture into a large bowl and add boiled eggs.  Crumble bacon over.  
Serve with herbed vinegar, on the side.

*For a vegetarian version, use olive oil, rather than bacon.