Kiss the Earth

Anytime home gardeners get together this time of year, the talk usually revolves around a few familiar topics. Weather. What's coming up in our gardens. What we didn't do last fall that we now have to do. New plants and designs we'd like to try.

And then somebody mentions onion grass and everyone groans.

It's quite charming to hear old timers who grew up around cows reminisce about how the fresh milk and homemade ice cream had an onion-y taste every spring 'cause that's what the cows were eating.

But no such romantic notions persist these days. Onion grass is a royal pain. I've been lazy about digging up the little bulbs and recently, thinking I was being so very clever, I covered a bunch of it in my sideyard with mulch. But the onion grass just poked through a few days later, making my nice neat mulch job look a mess. Very frustrating.

So I consulted with Bill Bamka, agricultural agent with the Rutgers cooperative extension in Burlington County. He laughed when I told him why I was calling.

It won't do to try and pull it out with your bare hands because it'll just break off, he says. Unless you're willing to "take no prisoners" with an herbicide like Roundup (which we're not), the only solution - and not a very good one, at that - is "to get in there with a shovel or fork and dig out the bulbs."

Or, he suggests, you could "pay your kids a penny apiece" for dug-up bulbs. On second thought, Bill says, "even my own children wouldn't do that."

He says onion grass is actually called a winter annual. (I call it lots of other things.) That means once the weather warms up a little, this pesky stuff will go away.

But there is no rest for the weed-weary. Once the onion grass dies back, something else pops up to take its place: Star-of-Bethlehem. This cute little nasty was introduced as an ornamental years ago and at some point took a leap over the fence. Now it's in everyone's garden, including one I saw last summer on a Main Line garden tour.

There it was, poking its miscreant self up here and there among the most gorgeous irises I've ever seen - Caesar's Brother. Deep, velvety purple, there were hundreds of them, in a very traditional - and otherwise pristine - garden. The army of gardeners tending that iris bed must've thought these "stars" belonged in the spotlight. Little did they know.

Definitely, little.