First Harvest from My Yard: Onion Grass!

(Submitted by Lee Fischman)
If you’re lucky enough to garden organically and have a bit of wildness left around your house, the first harvest of the season is upon us! Onion grass or wild garlic (Allium vineale) is easy to spot, as it shoots up first while the grass is still dormant. Upon inspection, it in fact looks a lot like chives. Break off a piece and if it smells garlicky, you’ll know you’ve got the real thing.

Onion grass is fully edible. In this article, I will walk you from harvest through a few ideas on what to do with them. First let me doubly emphasize that your garden must be organically tended.

Harvest onion grass by digging around them with a trowel, so that you pull up the full plant including its bulbs. Bigger, more mature onion grass = bigger bulbs. You can use a water hose to give them their first cleaning.

Now it’s time to take them indoors! I typically clean each strand under running water; it goes pretty quickly, especially if you’re meanwhile listening to NPR. While washing these, pull off any loose outer layers and the occasional woody portion. Next cut off the roots of the bulbs.

This is followed by another snip just above the bulb and you’re left with these wonderful little things. To my palate, they taste like a cross between Jerusalem artichokes and garlic. I’m going to seed these through the kimchi I’m making.

Now you’re left with the stalk, which I usually divide in two. First there’s the tougher bottom part, which can be chopped up and used much like the bottoms of scallions.

The top parts are succulent greens, which taste like slightly garlicky chives.

So far this season I’ve made these greens into a pesto, tossed them in pasta, and folded fold them into an omelette.