My old German grandmother used to call it “schnitlau,” though I’ve never seen the word used elsewhere. It was her name for the small wild onions that grew all over the place on our little farm — the same ones that grow all over the place hereabouts.
She would occasionally pick a handful, or have one of her grandchildren do it, which she would chop and use in some recipe. It was especially tasty mixed in with scrambled eggs.
Last year, we forgot to get scallions in town and I suggested that I could forage for some schnitlau. I did, and the resulting dish was great, though I suppose we’ll never know whether it was due to or despite my surprisingly intensely flavored wild contribution.
I think about it now because of the one tiny plant that has been growing all winter in my little garden plot. Everything got turned under in the fall, and everything except this lone volunteer accepted the winter’s nap. The one little wild onion, though, has acted as if it were spring all along, and has grown, survived all of winter’s hardships, and generally been entirely oblivious to the season.
How does it do it? I have no idea. It should have frozen, turned brown, and died politely. Instead, this one little plant has stood defiant.
It stood proud the other day, when I was considering the fact that it will soon be time to take to the garden with hoe and tiller, to turn under and aerate the carefully built patch of soil amid the clay that lies not far beneath the surface around here.
One of my favorite garden tricks is one that I really should have mentioned last fall, because then you could have employed it yourself over the winter. It’s coffee grounds.
Each day, when the coffee is brewed, I toss the grounds, paper filter and all, onto the garden.
I admit, it looks a little goofy, the pile of white cones, spilling their contents, that has grown since November. But in a few weeks, I’ll till it all under, mixing the grounds in with the good topsoil. The filter paper will get ripped up and become part of the soil, too. It holds water and will decompose over time. But the coffee grounds are the good part.
It’s a mystery to me why, but earthworms love coffee grounds. They — what? flock? migrate? what is the collective verb for what earthworms do? — okay, are drawn to the grounds, which they efficiently convert to rich, black earth.
Perhaps you are among those who as a child were told not to drink coffee because it would stunt your growth. I have no idea if this often-repeated admonition is true of humans, but it is a fact with earthworms. Over the years I’ve noticed that if you want big, fat worms for fishing, you’ll find them on the side of the compost pile where the manure is dumped. Any area where the coffee grounds are deposited is plenty rich in the squirmy critters, but they’re tiny — too small to put on a hook — and, it seems to me, they wriggle much, much faster.
It doesn’t matter, because even tiny worms enrich the soil the way nothing else does.
After I’ve turned the garden, broken up the surface and the resulting clods, I’ll fetch a wheelbarrow or two of compost from the pile, from the bottom of it where the leaves and grass and eggshells and grapefruit rinds of the last half-decade have been transformed, and work it in. It will be soft and springy to walk on, then, and have a glorious aroma.
I’ve come to have great affection for garden felt, the brown material that comes in a roll and that can be staked down over a garden, with holes cut in it where the tomato and pepper plants are to be planted. It helps hold in the moisture, seems to keep the ground a little warmer, and prevents weeds from growing. Once the soil is just the way I want it, I’ll roll out the felt (which is normally used around shrubs and covered with something such as bark mulch). Then, when the likelihood of a hard freeze has passed, the tomatoes and peppers will get planted and spring will officially have arrived.
It won’t be long now.
Of course, by then my lone schnitlau plant will have been turned under. It has been nice to watch its optimistic, oblivious growth through frost and snow, but we can’t grow overly sentimental about such things.
Maybe rather than just till it in with the coffee grounds and compost, I’ll pull it, and chop it up, and fry some bacon and scramble some eggs. And in so doing, get transported to a time when I was tiny and the smell of those wild onions in my grandmother’s kitchen was all that I needed to know that things were exactly as things should be.
Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.