Kiss the Earth

A reader who obviously kisses the earth at every opportunity wonders if onion grass is edible. At first, I thought, heck no, unless you're a cow. A while later I was on the phone with Jim May, a master gardener in South Jersey who knows lots about plants, and I asked him. He said that onion grass is about as close as we're going to get to domestically grown chives and in his opinion, yes, it's an edible grass.

"If you want to dig it out of the ground and eat it - this is my opinion here - you can. I don't think it's poisonous," he says.

You can use the grassy part as you would the herb chives and you could try cooking with the bulbs. Up to you.

Jim calls onion grass "the first green fuzzy entry into your backyard every spring," along with crocuses and tulips. It sounds so cute. But even Jim has his limits.

Every year he goes ballistic over one weed in his yard, he says. Guess which one he's going after this year ...