Yes but what species do you actually mean? There are multiple called “onion weed”.
Oxalis is an incredibly invasive weed and there are no easy solutions. Poisons don’t really work because they just don’t remain on its leaves. The best is to assiduously dig* out every plant that comes up, removing every bulb and bulbil from its root system. You have to do this for 3 or 4 years as remaining bulbs/bulbils sprout, and wind-borne seeds blow into your garden.
Edit: as HM said: don’t pull it out because bulbs will remain. Dig it out. Go carefully through the soil that you have collected and remove every bulb and bulbil.
Edit: This probably the first post in BB history to mention “bulbils”. These are like little bulbs that form on the main root of the oxalis. They will fall off if you pull out the main plant and will generate a new weed the next year.
Doing all this work to eliminate this weed, I often thought “If only they could use their power for niceness instead of evil”
I have had success killing oxalis in my lawn with Bin-Die, a selective weed killer.
Mrs Fox will not let me use it in the Garden, as I sprayed a plant that looked like Oxalis, and it died, but it was some flowering thing she had planted.
Anyway Bin-Die worked very well in the lawn and didn’t kill the grass.
Oxalis is the yellow flowered sour-sop. You can chew on it if you like sour things.
Onion weed though is actually an allium. It has a white drooping slightly bell-shaped flower. If you knock any with a whipper snipper it’s like you have been cutting onions!
I have piles of both. Do eat the onion weed in a pinch (out of spring onions).
We have some areas of it (onion weed). One small area of mainly grass -but also some onion weed - the missus in early winter progressively covered with a double layer of cardboard (there’s a pet barn where they let you take as much cardboard as you want, effectively). Then we do visits to a local cafe that piles its coffee grounds into wheelbarrows at the back. First few times a couple years ago they said not to take too much as others might want it. Lately the demand has dropped off (post covid?) and they are pleading with us to take as much as we can. We take tubs and get a full wheelbarrow’s worth at a time. Goes over the cardboard. This patch has crept up to about 25m2? Useless in a big paddock, but meaningful for this patch in our back garden. Then leaves we collect go over the coffee (3 layers all up). Coffee seems to resist much germinating in it, but established plants seem to like it (citrus seem to respond well to coffee mulch). Anyway, no onion weed (or anything else) has made it through - we’ll see what happens next year! The missus is just leaving it for now but will plant some tussocks eventually.
Dunno what would happen if you got onto one of those coffee recycling systems where they deliver used grounds to you. Might not work so well for local critters if you did this large scale?
It’s not oxalis, it’s the white flower onion weed. A true ■■■■ of a thing, I can’t imagine eating it but may do so to enact revenge, similar to when I ordered a crocodile pie in port Douglas.
WA, currently in regional tree and timber quarantine, would welcome recipes for shot hole borer.
WA has about the strictest plant quarantine against the rest of Australia, but it can’t keep out those pests that swim of fly on the wind across the Indian Ocean.
I’m not an expert, but I believe that there’s a lot of different types of oxalis, some less obnoxious than others.
Also, there’s a lot of things that LOOK like oxalis but aren’t, as i learned a while back after triumphantly announcing how i’d almost gotten rid of it to a visiting bushland management guy, only to discover I’d been ferociously crusading against some inoffensive native herb
We used to eat sour grass as kids, the one with the yellow flower. According to Wiki, it is an oxalis of South African origin and used in food there. IDK whether, like cape weed, its spread comes from our soldiers returning from the Boer War.
There is. I’ve seen hybridised species for sale in production nursery’s. Almost as bad as aquariums selling azola.
The smaller species with little white flowers is the one that has done my head in for years.
If you chem spray them on the cusp of the growing and dormant period it sometimes works as the plant draws nutrients and such back into the bulb for overwintering.
Native frangipani has come into flower, the scent of honey. A bird has found it, shrill chirps to the other birds to come.
A survivor of a fierce pruner who cut it down, who killed the Banksia rose and tried to kill off the dwarf pomegranate as well as the ornamental grape vine. Someone who doesn’t believe in the existence of deciduous plants.
The abundant yellow freesias in my front garden bed are in full bloom and the beautiful perfume is so strong that I’ve heard passers-by comment about the lovely aroma.
I struggled with oxalis for years in our veggie patch, then easily got rid of it by building a shed over it.
The onion grass on the nature strip got taken care of by a mob of Major Mitchell cockatoos and corellas who manage to dig it all out. They make a mess of the gum trees at times though.
