Re: Eradicating "onion weed"

Pam--It's also a nasty weed in the Alcatraz Island
gardens, particularly on the west side.

Deborah 
--- p.k.peirce@att.net wrote:

> 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 



       
____________________________________________________________________________________
Moody friends. Drama queens. Your life? Nope! - their life, your story. Play Sims Stories at Yahoo! Games.
http://sims.yahoo.com/
Other Mailing lists | Author Index | Date Index | Subject Index | Thread Index