Eating the wrong wild plant can kill you. Positively identify every plant before you eat it, using a good regional field guide or an experienced forager.
Many people know field garlic (Allium vineale), also called crow garlic, by smell before they know it by sight: it is the sharp onion scent that rises when a lawn is mowed in early spring. Once you can pick it out, you see its grassy clumps everywhere.
How to identify field garlic
Field garlic has poisonous look-alikes. The most common is star-of-Bethlehem (Ornithogalum umbellatum), a lawn bulb with grassy leaves that are flat with a white stripe down the middle and no onion smell. Across much of North America, and especially in the West, death camas (Toxicoscordion species) is far more dangerous; it has flat, V-shaped leaves, cream-colored flowers and no onion smell. Check every one of these points:
- Leaves in clumps. Several slender leaves rise together from a cluster of bulbs underground. The plant stands 1 to 3 feet tall when it flowers.
- Hollow, round leaves. From a distance it passes for grass. Tear a leaf and it is a hollow tube, like a chive.
- A bulb at the base. Dig around a clump and pull it up, and each leaf rises from a small, papery-skinned bulb.
- A flower head of tiny bulbs. In late spring and early summer a stalk carries a rounded cluster at the top, often made mostly of small bulblets, sometimes with a few little pinkish to purple six-petaled flowers among them.
- An onion or garlic smell when crushed. This is the deciding test, and the North Carolina Extension plant profile gives the same rule: harvest only plants with the distinct odor. No smell, not an allium, and not something to eat.
Crush each plant separately with clean fingers. Once your hands smell of onion, every plant you touch afterward will seem to smell of it too, including the poisonous ones.
Where to find it
Field garlic came from Europe and is now widespread across the eastern and central United States, with scattered populations farther west. Look in lawns, yards, pastures, roadsides, disturbed ground and open woods. Skip sprayed lawns and busy roadsides.
How to eat it
Field garlic needs no special preparation. Wash the plants, trim the roots and peel the papery outer skin off each bulb, as you would with any onion.
The bulbs go into any dish that calls for onion or garlic, though they are fiddly to clean in quantity. The leaves, tougher than garden chives, can be chopped and used the same way. Chopped bulbs and leaves are good in scrambled eggs or an omelet.
Eat it in reasonable amounts. Like other onions, large quantities can upset the stomach. Keep it away from dogs and cats, for which all onions and garlic are toxic.