Eradicating "onion weed"

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Yes, Nothoscardum inodorum. It isn't really a garlic or an onion, though it is in the Amaryllidaceae, and some call it "false garlic." It has a flower that looks vaguely like a white triteleia, which fools some into not removing it immediately. Big mistake.

 

In the City College garden, none has seeded for years, but we still have some in several beds. The worst of it is that the bulblets, which are about the size of grains of rice, shed readily when you remove the bulb. And there are dozens of them at the base of a mature plant. Also, they start out white, so these show in soil, but at maturity, they turn soil brown and are much harder to see.

 

I agree, the only way to get a mature plant is to dig down to the bulb and remove a wad of soil with the bulb and bulblets. It is the only weed that causes me to part with any of our well-amended and fertilized soil. Digging the bulb can be tricky because it can be as deep as a shovel can reach, or deeper. I think the young plants have a contractile root that pulls them deeper as they grow. (I don't think it is ever possible to pull this plant, rather than dig it, and not have it grow right back.)

 

Once the bulblets have broken off into the soil, they can blanket an area with the tiny green threads of new plants. The only way to get them is to dig painstakingly with a trowel before they are big enough to make more bulblets. You have to be careful, or the bulblet breaks off.

 

We tried Roundup on a bed of plantlets, and it might have set them back a bit, but they don't all start growing at once, so the ones we killed were soon replaced. And when you dig the soil, more turn up near enough the surface to grow.

 

We are making progress against this plant, as students learn to dig the bulblet-plants, but oh my how I wish I had never seen this awful weed.

 

Pam Peirce

San Francisco, CA