Wild Food Foragers of America - Wild Green Onions

Vol 1, No 4
Page 1

Wild Green Onion (Allium spp.)
Family: Lily (Liliaceae)

July 2003

Bulblet cluster

Where I've run across them, wild onions have tended to grow one here, one there, mostly out in open fields. I had always thought of them as solitary souls until recently, when I ran into a huge cache of them at my recently vacated rent house. When I had lived there, I'd found a few green onions scattered in the lawn and delighted in snipping off a leaf or two for my baked potato or salad from February til around mid-May, then again in the fall. When I moved, I rented the house out for 7 years to a family with 2 rotwallers (not at all conducive to visiting their back yard). When they moved recently and we went back to tidy up the place, I was shocked to find my little solitaries had turned into dozens of huge clumps hidden in the tall grass, most of them sporting "bulblet clusters", which I had never seen before! I had always mowed the grass in May, before they got to that stage. Knowing no one could ever appreciate this treasure as much as myself, my husband helped me dig them all up and bring home a jackpot harvest which took me 2 days to process! You'll see in the slide show that I didn't waste a thing, not even the tough old flower stems that I'll bet most people throw away! But for now, here are some facts on wild green onions.

Wild onions are members of the lily family (Liliaceae) which botanists estimate contain between 4-6000 species distributed throughout the world. This family is extremely complex and includes around 250 genera, including tulips, day lilies, onions, amaryllis, asparagus, and aloe. The Allium genus alone contains about 500 species which include the onion family--garlics, leeks, shallots, onions, chives, most of them common throughout the northern hemisphere.

Before I go on, I'd like to share the thoughts of a botanically challenged person (me) as I've tried to wrap my mind around the huge subject of Plant Classifications and how to remember the scientific names of the weeds I eat. I've been making a bit of progress this month, and give my summary below:

Plant classification is an "attempt" to organize hundreds of thousands of different plants into a meaningful scheme of contrast and comparison. The International Code of Botanical Nomenclature, which sets the rules that govern the naming of plants, currently recognizes seven ranks of living things:

Kingdom, Division, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. (we learned this much in high school)
Five Kingdoms are recognized today: Monera, Protista, Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia
(that's 3 more than some of us learned in high school)

Plantae is the Kingdom that concerns us weed lovers, of course. So far, this is easy! Then, the plant kingdom is "divided" into vascular plants (tubes carry water and food throughout the plant) and non-vascular plants (mosses and liverworts). Still pretty linear. But then, each Division is broken down into two or more Classes; each Class contains two or more Orders, each Order contains two or more Families, each Family contains two or more Genera (plural for Genus), each Genus usually (not always) contains two or more spp (plural for Species). The pyramid gets wider and deeper, and the kicker is that more than 55O,OOO species of land and water plants have been identified on our planet, and the whole pyramid becomes such a formidable amount of information to catalog, I realize that it's too much for even the botanically gifted to remember. So, now I don't feel so dumb. Instead, I can run around in the field with my little identification books (like they do), and at home I go to a website I recently discovered:

The Plants Database, where I can search for any plant by common name or scientific name, and each one is supposed to reveal the other. Give it a try.

The importance of providing the scientific name in the masthead of this publication is that while a specific plant may go by many "common names", it only has one "scientific name". This universal language allows subscribers from different parts of the world to know we are communicating about the same plant.

So, folks, I'm going to urge those of you who are "botanically challenged" like me, to learn one scientific name a month just as I am doing, and that's why the masthead reads as follows:

Wild Green Onion (Allium spp.)
Family: Lily (Liliaceae)
which translates as
Common Name (Genus, many species)
Family: Common Name (Scientific Name)

So now we're talking about Allium, one species of which is commonly known as wild green onion, prairie onion, autumn onion and many other provincial names. Sometimes its flowers are white, sometimes, pink, sometimes purple. Sometimes they're short. Sometimes they're up to 2.5 feet tall. This site identifies 238 species of Allium. In general, they all take full sun to partial shade). They are all perennials. The leaves disappear after flowering. There are close look alikes, but ONLY alliums smell like onions. Just break off a leaf and smell first before you start chewing on a look-alike. According to Peterson's Field Guide, all species of Allium are edible (including wild leeks and garlic, which also have an oniony smell), though over-eating them can cause diarrhea and some are toxic to cats and livestock.

Only 3 pages came up on an internet search for "wild green onion", but that jumped to 660 for "Allium spp", and 9,000 entries for "wild onion" (which mostly turned out to be names of clubs, groups, businesses, books and products. All in all, there are very few on-line pages about this plant. The links on Page 3 are about all I found worth reading. Do be sure and read them--the information I found there is good, and I shall not repeat it herein.

Here's a bit of "Onion Trivia":

What compound in onions brings tears to your eyes and in large quantity can give you diahrrea?
Sulfuric compounds. To cut down on the crying, chill the onions first. Wild onions don't make you cry much, though. Cooking breaks down the compounds.
What should you eat to get rid of onion breath?
Fresh parsley. Drinking milk helps, too.
What country boasts the highest per-capita consumption of onions.
Libya, with 66.8 pounds of onions consumed per person each year. Americans dine on 18 pounds per capita per year.
What domestic onions are sweetest and where are they grown?
Arizona (Grand Canyon Sweets); California (Sweet Imperials and Coachella Sweets); Georgia (Vidalias); Hawaii (Maui Sweets); New Mexico (Nu-Mex and Carzalia Sweets); Texas (1015s and Super Sweets); Washington (Walla Wallas).

Identification, Harvest and Preparation:
ID tips, slide show and colorful photos are on Page 2, linked to below.

History, Botanical info, and Recipes: on Page 3, linked to below.

Information Exchange : Subscribers and visitors, please add your knowledge of this weed here--recipes, experiences, anecdotes, questions, opinions. (A unique thread is posted with every issue to gather more information. Please do check out our Wild Edibles Info Exchange.

Archived issues: Thistles, Chickweed, Spiderwort, Wild Green Onions , Plantain, Elder, Hawksbeard, Wild Green Onion, Wood Sorrell. Dock, Hedge Nettle are in progress. Sign up for notice when the next issue comes out.

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Please let me know what you think about the publication! You can contact me anytime.

Thanks, and enjoy!

Standing knee deep in abundance!

P.S. While this newsletter is free, your donations help keep it coming. It's a gosh awful lot of effort. Suggested donation per household is $15/year. 4 major credit cards, Visa, MC, Discover, and American Express are accepted. You may also send a check to: Wild Food Foragers of America, P.O.Box 41621, Baton Rouge, LA. 70835-1621
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Disclaimer:

Information given in the newsletter is educational but should not be considered definitive. Every effort is made to present clear testimonials from personal experience, however, different people may have different reactions than the author's experience. The author makes no attempt to identify every plant. If you choose to eat weeds, start out with a small amount and notice your reaction. Considerable effort is made to provide readers access to additional materials for the positive identification, harvesting and preparation of wild edible weeds, BUT you are ultimately responsibe for your own education, actions and diet.
To avoid poisonous look-alikes, foragers should always identify by SEVERAL indicators (by leaf, flower, seed pod, root and stem, by shape, texture, veination, color, hairiness, growth pattern, season, etc.) before eating from the wild. Different plants might look very similar to the untrained eye.
You should not pick weeds in polluted areas--along roadsides, near trash dumps, in fields or gardens likely to have been sprayed with pesticides or commercial fertilizers, etc.
You should not over-pick. The general rule of thumb is to harvest no more than 20% of an area, leaving the plants ample opportunity to regenerate for the next year, the next generation, and leaving something behind for the next forager. Becoming familiar with propagation methods can assist you in determining the most prudent conservation techniques for each plant.
You should always wash weeds before eating them. Dust is everywhere, insects and slugs naturally make their homes in vegetation, and birds do fly overhead! Let common sense be your guide.
Do not hesitate to call a doctor if you should have an adverse reaction to anything you touch or ingest in the wild. If you can bring the physician a sample, or identify the offending plant by name, all the better.

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