Onion Weed
Seed, above
Onion Weed
Removed, Medium
| Onion Weed Seed, above | | Onion Weed Removed, Medium | | ||
 | Class: | Plants (Plantae) - Land Plants (Charophyta) - Land Plants (Equisetopsida) | |||
| Order: | Asparagus (Asparagales) | ||||
| Family: | Asphodels (Asphodelaceae) iNaturalist Observation | ||||
| Species: | Onion Weed (Asphodelus fistulosus) | ||||
| This Photo: | 🔍Removed, Small🔎 | ||||
| Other names: | NOT MORE ONION WEED ! Onion-leafed Asphodel or Pink Asphodel | ||||
Thank you Alan Dandie for confirming the id of this species for us EXTRA - Photo Specific Information: These 3 specimens we removed were not that healthy. The medium one shows the usual yellow colour of the roots. On the larger one, the roots look a bit rotten (blacker than usual). On the small one, they broke off. But these photo's should give a good idea of the basic structure of the plant. Importantly, there's no bulb lower down. The onion reference is to the leaf only. General Species Information: Found on Ellura (in the Murray Mallee, SA) and elsewhere #1 Enemy: Loves 250mm/yr rainfall. We have erradicated it. We still see new seedlings in "good" years, but in new locations, so brought in from neighbouring areas by wildlife. Will decimate an area, regardless of grazing, killing saltbush, zygophylum, etc, as it goes. Vigorous; will germinate, flower and seed within 3 weeks in spring. ~90% of seed germinates in first year in our area. Resilient: never leave removed plants on the ground. They will flower & seed (out of the ground)! Hard to poison. Needs good wetting agent. We're convinced Onion Weeds are Allelopathic; ie exude Allelochemicals to inhibit further germination of it's own seed. We found when we pulled all our large plants from Ellura in one season, they were then replaced the following season with millions of seedlings. Thanks to David Armstrong for letting us know about this phenomenon. We recognised it existed with onion weed, but didn't realise it was a recognised phenomenon; let alone had a name. We've written a discussion paper on this to help you control your outbreak. Click here to download (it's about 2.7mb) Updated 11 AM, 06 April 2014 The photo's here are explained in more detail in the discussion paper. You can see Brush Cutting (not on Ellura) only stopped it seeding, but grew over a hot dry summer. The Before & After photo's of our worst 3 acre patch on Ellura, after 12m of hard work. With the experiment of a seedling patch, you can see poisoning had the best results, after 2 months. | |||||
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