The Escaping Onions!

   I have a habit of cutting the root end of any onion that I use deeply so I can replant the thing.  Onions are some of those fine plants that will happily grow from just a severed root.  These plants are not in a row in the vegetable garden but sit in any vacant spot in ANY garden.  I like onions.  Not only do they make food tasty, they have lovely blooms, to my way of thinking.  So...there are onions in just about every flower garden in the yard.

  I noticed this morning that one onion plant was going to seed.  That is fine by me but I promise this particular onion must be kin to one of those "walking onions".  That type actually does not need to ever be replanted.  Once the tiny bulblets form on the top of the stalk, it bends over and lets the bulblets take root.  The stalk dies off and the old plant continues life.  The newly rooted bulblets start their new life as full blown onions about a foot away from the parent plant.  These things are escaping the confines of the gardens!  Onions are everywhere!  They are taking over the yard and send up the most pungent smell when I cut the grass.  This all came from one white onion from the grocery store.  

  It has become apparent that I need to get rid of a whole slew of the onions, chives and garlic in the gardens.  I hate wasting the things but since neither Mark nor Son care to eat them, something has to be done.  Onions, onions everywhere!

The Doppelganger In My Garden!

  It is not a lie when I tell you that I grow a lot of Allium related plants in my garden.  The chives have just about taken over, the garlic is doing extremely well, shallots are being quite happy and onions are constantly being replaced as I use them.  I have lots and lots of alliums!  Why?  First, I use a lot.  While Mark and Son are not big on any of the above, I could eat them at every meal and be perfectly blissful.  Second, they are just so easy to grow!  Plop them in the ground and forget about them for a while and then you have a fine crop.  Almost all of the alliums in my gardens are from salvaged root ends from store-bought ones.  I just save the last half inch near the root end and stick it in a bit of water for a day then plant.  Ta da!!!  Onions, shallots, garlic, chives...oh, my!  The original plants are still going strong and multiplying like crazy so no more store bought alliums!

The onion impostor!

  Then, there is one cluster of bulbs that mimics the onions.  Well, it looks a lot like wild onions when you first look at the plant.  It grows from a bulb, has leaves like an onion and makes white blooms like some onions.  Other than the blooms being slightly different, the biggest identifying factor is that these plants do not have the strong smell that true alliums have.  So, big tip here!  If it looks like an onion and smells like an onion...it is an onion.  If that smell is lacking, don't eat it!  The plant is an impostor!  It may be a pretty impostor but it is still an impostor!  I have never eaten one so cannot attest to this fact but the plant is said to be poisonous!  Do not eat!  Why take the chance when you can just take a sniff to tell the difference? 

  The false onion, false garlic or (what Pop called it) crow's poison does indeed have a place in my garden but not where it has so inconveniently decided to grow.  I would hate for some unsuspecting visitor to pull the plant thinking they are going to cook up some fantastic dish then discover too late that what they just stir-fried was not a cluster of onions at all.  So, the plant will be dug and moved to the flower garden to add a bit of early springtime beauty.  

Pizza....Garden Style!

  Once again, my friend sought out the peace that only the Bayou can bring.  "Can I come to the Bayou?  I need a little Bayou Therapy." she said when she called.  Sure, come on over.  All afternoon, we fished and she spilled her feelings.  The Bayou seems to be the ideal place to throw things out there, mull them over and then put them back in a decent order.  

  Long about 6 o'clock in the evening, I felt a hunger pang and decided that fishing needed to cease for a while.  I was hungry!  But...I had forgotten to thaw anything from the freezer.  Well, we would just have to make do with what was on hand.  As we wandered back up the board path from the pier, an idea hit me.  Pizza!  We would make pizza!  Darlene looked a tad confused.  "I thought you can't eat meat.  How are we going to make pizza?"  Easy enough!  We would make a garden pizza!  She looked at me a bit dubiously and shrugged her shoulders.  My friend is not one that experiments in the kitchen much....I do.   So, I grabbed tomatoes, onions, fresh basil and fresh oregano from the garden and set her to work chopping.  After the pizza dough was spread on the pan and lightly baked, I started layering on the veggies and herbs.  "No sauce?" she queried.  Nope.  No sauce.  Once again, I caught her with a puzzled look on her face.  After assuring her that it would be tasty, we added seasoning and loaded on mozzerella cheese!  The pizza was popped back into the oven for about 15 minutes.  Oh, my goodness!  The kitchen started smelling delightful and Darlene's expression started to change from doubtful to eager.

  Once our supper was on the table and we gave thanks, the sampling began.  Yep, that was one tasty pizza!  In fact, we almost did not get a picture of creation!  It was disappearing fast!  Fresh garden style pizza....that is supper!  Yum!  Good friends, good food....doesn't get much better!

The Never Ending Crop!

  The garden is home to a lot of "recycled" plants.  Celery is quickly taking over one box and it started as a leftover root chunk from a bunch out of the grocery store.  Basil is popping up everywhere from seeds that my sweet daughter-in-law gave me several years ago from her garden. Potato plants that fill flowerpots started out as a possible french fry and wound up as a sprouted potato.  And onions...onions are in every garden box, every flowerpot every vacant spot I can find. These things tend to take over the place once you realize that after buying just one sack at the grocery store, you should never have to purchase another onion.  Saving the root end of an onion, sticking it in the ground somewhere and giving it the freedom to do whatever it wishes, will see you with more of these bulbs than you will ever need.  What started as an experiment of "recycled" gardening has pretty much taken over most of my space.  

This onion had to "escape" the garden box to bloom. The box was too crowded with onions for it to successfully bloom otherwise.

  This morning while I was out picking tomatoes, I noticed that a few of the onions were going to seed.  Well, now.  That is good....and bad. Good that the plants are reseeding themselves and I shall have numerous more onion sets to plant.  Bad since once an onion blooms, it is not as firm as it is during prebloom stage.  Not that this makes the onion inedible but rather that it makes it rather unstable when storing.  Onions are some of those things that can just be harvested, cleaned (not washed) and plopped or hung in a dry place.  They will stay usable for months!  Pop always stored his by hanging them by their leaves in the barn.   It was not uncommon to find hundreds of onion bunches dangling from the rafters in the old barn.  The onions stayed perfectly fine in their swinging state!

  As for the onions going to bloom in the garden, a few will stay to produce seeds while most others will be pulled and hung to dry, chopped and placed in the freezer or canned. Some will eventually be replanted to start a new crop.  Onions are truly a never ending crop as long as you care for them properly!

Is it? Or is it not?

  Someone asked me the other day if wild onions are edible.  You know, those things that pop up in the lawn and make the place smell wonderful (if you are like me and love onions) when you hit them with the lawnmower or those things that seem to be the bane of every homeowner (except me!) who wishes to have the perfect lawn or those things that, as kids, we all dared our siblings to taste.  Those are all one and the same...wild onions.  Now to answer the question.  Yes.  Wild onions are edible although you may not want to overdo with them.  In a pinch, the lovely little green plants can be added as a flavoring but there is some question as to using them in mass quantities.  I guess that goes back to the "extensive tests have not been done" disclaimer that is tagged on most things. It seems that the wild onions are toxic to dogs so, therefore, contain a mild form of toxicity.  Humans seem to not have problems with it, though.  Now comes the kicker....

  Not all things that look like wild onions are wild onions.  There are things that we always called "crow's poison" that looks remarkably similar to wild onions.  They are green, have small white bulbs and blooms that might be mistaken for the onion bloom.  These are said to be extremely toxic by some folks..  While I cannot attest to this as fact (since I have not eaten one), my advice is "Do not eat them."  Grandmother had a saying "When in doubt, throw it out."  Maybe that does not apply here but the thought is the same...sort of...just don't eat something that causes you doubt. It is, however, easy to distinguish the two.  Wild onions smell like...well, onions.  Crow's poison does not.  It smells like...nothing.  If there is an odor, it is mild and grass like.

Wild onions definitely smell like onions.

Crow's Poison does not have the onion/garlic smell of wild onions.

   My question?  Since it is so easy to grow onions of any sort, why would you need to forage for wild ones.  Onions and chives are some of those things that can be grown from the small root end of the stuff you buy in the store and once you get a start, you never need to replant.  They just grow...continuously.

  Now a tidbit about the curious name of crow's poison.  Plants sometimes have weird names but this one takes the cake.  Crow's poison, from what I was told as a kid by Granddad, was labeled such years and years ago.  Maybe this is just a local thing as another name for the plant is false garlic. Understandable...but crow's poison is a different story altogether.  It seems that once folks found that the plant was toxic to most animals, they decided to make use of it.  Being a resourceful folk during a time when the corner Walmart was not there, farmers smashed the plant to get the inner sap.  That juice was plastered all over their young chicks in an attempt to keep crows from nabbing them for supper. The thought was that if a crow stole a chick, it would eat the toxic gunk along with the chick resulting in a dead crow.  The smashed bulbs were also mixed with grain and left in fields in hopes that a whole murder of crows would die.  The murder was murdered, in that case.  Which is a tad ridiculous as no one calls a flock of crows a murder of crows and not many folks think of killing birds as murder.  (I do...on both accounts.)  So there you have it.  A weird name for a plant, an edible plant that everyone hates,  a toxic plant that may or may not be toxic, a story passed down through the generations that may be just a great tale that contains not a bit of truth.  Lots of fun stuff!