(country music) - I am sitting in a sea of wild prairie onions.

It's a little early in season for them right now.

Normally, they have this beautiful kind of purple, pink, white bloom on top, and so they're much easier to see.

But we are gonna show you what they look like prior to their blooming.

And they love rocky outcrop areas, prairie lands, they do great in kind of places you would never expect them to thrive such as this cactus filled, rocky outcrop area.

They are all over.

And so you're gonna have that onion smell.

They have different than wild garlic.

They have one stem going straight up.

The prairie onion has a few different green stems coming up from it.

And then right here, this is what's gonna turn into that really pretty pink-ish, purple, white-ish whorl bloom.

And so the best time to harvest the wild prairie onion is late July, early August.

This is a threatened native plant due to habitat loss.

It's why it's threatened as are most wild native plants.

I harvest them after they have gone to seed.

And so I'll let that seed scatter, and then when I do dig up the bulb again, I just take the root tips and put that back into the ground and then just take the bulb, and the whole plant is edible as well.

They're there and they're back here and they blend in with the grass.

And so you, you know, those blue purple, blue pink blooms are a giveaway for them, and they're much easier to detect and spot later in the season.

We have dug one partially up.

And so I never dig a big hole.

I just gently go under the soil to get to the bulb.

And this is a really large one.

They're typically, I find them a little bit smaller than this.

So this is a beautiful wild prairie onion.

And they are smaller, right, than say, our garden onions.

They pack such an amazing punch though, just this amazing onion-y flavor and a bulb goes a very long way.

And so what I'm gonna do is cut off those root tips and put them right back where it came from.

And then I am going to cover that back up so you won't even know I was here.