I complained to S. yesterday that our lawn was looking rough. Mowing now would be a disservice to the pollinators that are enjoying the deadnettle, so she suggested I could express my desire for order by working to remove the volunteer green onions. These onions grow in clumps, and create long green manes of savory-smelling “grass”.
She’d seen advice recently that the best way to get rid of these onions was to use a spade to cut down and under them, pull the layer of soil back to expose the bulbs, then pull each onion by its bulb “down” through the soil. Sort of like hair plugs in reverse. I don’t really know anything about hair plugs.
I worked on a couple small patches for maybe 45 minutes, ended up with a pile of tiny white bulbs and long green … stems? … and made pretty much zero difference in the aesthetics of our lawn.
S. observed that men aren’t interested in weeding, only in mowing, and I guess that’s true in my case. I have very little enthusiasm for gardening, and only slightly more for lawn care. My primary interest in mowing the lawn is making it look tidy, a goal that’s often in direct opposition to S.'s. I don’t need the lawn to be a sterile monoculture of Bermuda grass or whatever, but a part of me does need my stuff to present an acceptable face to the world, to look intentional.
I might come back to the Onion Project, if only to work on my gardening muscles a little bit. The onion bulbs, packed together as they are, remind me of spider eggs, which kinda grosses me out.