The neighbors were giving us funny looks, but hey, it's free food! The almost-4 and 5 year old had a hard time stopping, and it's true - once you get started, you want to pull one more. Especially in a yard filled with them! In fact, since then, the four year old has made a habit of bringing me more every day, and I'm so up to my ears in wild garlic that her offerings are being thrown in an overgrown flower bed.
Maybe that's not a good idea. It will be horrible trying to get the baby wild garlic out of that bed when I redo it next summer...
As an aside, I wouldn't recommend eating anything growing in a treated lawn. We grow our lawn with minimal care, mostly because it grows fine on its own (with the exception of a couple places) and I never really enjoyed the level of work and chemicals it takes to make a yard have only one kind of plant in it. I am willing to put up with dandelions and clover (which are beautiful flowers to my 4 year old) if it means I have more time to do other things I enjoy more.
So I washed the wild garlic really well; it looks almost exactly like a green onion, except the bulb tends to be bumpier.
After a good washing, I started chopping. The stalks on wild garlic are tougher than green onions; even my sharp butcher knife had some problems slicing through parts of it. If you do indeed have wild garlic, harvesting and chopping brings about a strong onion smell. I can always tell when someone has mowed in my area for this reason - no freshly cut grass scent here! Just onion! If you don't smell onion, don't eat it! It's probably not edible. The daffodil bulb and shoots look a lot like wild onion but are deadly. They also don't have that strong onion smell.
Once I chopped them, I decided that I wanted to dry half of them and make them into a wild garlic powder to replace my onion powder. So I placed them on a cookie sheet in my oven, set it at 170 degrees, and propped it open about 3/4" with a clothespin (hey, I guess the clothespin means I'm resourceful?)
Unfortunately, as some of you in the middle south may remember, we had torrential rain a good part of last week, including tornadoes and all sorts of awful stuff. Our humidity level was 99% here in Middle Tennessee. After four hours the smallest part of the stalks were dry. The next day, I put them in for six more hours. This is starting to get not as thrifty as I would have liked! At the end of the six hours, all but the largest bulbs were dry. I am going to spend this weekend grinding up everything, laying it out again, and trying once more.
As an aside, check out this blog post about wild garlic for more information and recipes. He does a great job of explaining his process in depth.
