Expert forager Johanna Knox shares some tips on foraging onion weed, which was one of the first things she started scavenging for about 13 years ago.
For more detailed advice, you can also check out Knox’s book called The Forager's Treasury: The essential guide to finding and using wild plants in Aotearoa.
Photo: 123RF
Knox tells Jesse Mulligan one of the distinguishing features of onion weed is its smell - which is just like onion.
"If it doesn't smell like onion weed or onion, then it's not.
"It does grow among the long grass so you have to kind of go closer and then examine the blades, so grass is quite flat but onion weed have these blades that are really distinctively three-cornered, they've got three little sharp corners vertically.
"It is also recognisable a little bit from a distance by white flowers, so quite a bit will be flowering at the moment."
A warning for foragers is to avoid collecting onion weed that has weed killer sprayed on it or is near the road.
"I definitely wouldn't pick it from right by a road, where you've got exhaust fumes landing all over it ... and definitely be careful of places where there might be weed killer sprayed."
It's best to get it from places you're familiar with and know what goes on the grass, she says.
"If you are worried about it, then just forage from your own garden."
Johanna Knox foraging Photo: supplied
In winter, it tends to shrink back in the ground and starts to flower and sprout in spring, she says.
"You can harvest the whole thing if you want. If you pull it up by the roots, I mean that's probably quite a good thing to in a lot of ways because you're also getting rid of it, because it is an invasive weed.
"You could cut it off at the base and harvest the green bits and the flowers if you wanted."
It's also easy to find uses for onion weed because it's similar to spring onion but milder, she says.
"You can use every part of it, you can use roots if you scrub the soil off them well, you can use the blades and the flowers, they're really delicious and they taste like onion as well but just even milder than the leaves."
Knox says she likes to use them in an onion flower tempura recipe.
"[Snip] the flowers off with a bit of the leafy base left so that they're still all holding together in a cluster and then just dip them into batter and fry them up.
"The secret is to have very cold batter and very hot oil and also just watch them like a hawk, so they don't get burned."
