LOL! This brings back memories! When I was about 6 years old I used to pull them up & try to sell them. I made a sign - "Fresh Onions - Just Picked! 5 cents a bunch" & sat in front of my house. Believe it or not, I actually made about a dollar. Of course people bought them because I was "cute" - not because they needed onions. It also helped that I sold 5 bunches to my grandfather. LOL!

Wild onions/garlic will establish themselves most anywhere. In loose cultivated and nutrient rich soil they can get rather huge compared to the kinds you see in the common lawn...bigger than the green onions with bulbs you see at the grocery store. Wild onion is present pretty much everywhere in large dispersal areas...from Florida to Alaska and all points in between (but not Hawaii). Wild garlic is found pretty much everywhere but not as much in the arid areas in the US. The problem isn't soil stewardship as much as it is anyone who has an un-mowed or wild strip of land with flowering onions on them...especially if a bird has pecked them up after dispersal from the plant and pooped them onto your land. Unless your neighbor goes a very long time between mowings that let wild onion/garlic flower and set seed (this takes quite a long time) then your problem is probably coming from further away than him and your issue is probably birds/animals. As far as removal...it's a pain. You really do need to get down in there and remove as much of the bulb as possible manually by digging them out. There's some that will suggest natural herbicides or other types of treatments, but we're talking about some really tough bulbs here. This post was edited by nc-crn on Mon, Apr 7, 14 at 6:45

Bermuda grass is not the only type of grass that can create these sorts of "weed" problems, although it does have a reputation for being one of the worst. A great many other common turf grass species can display this trait. Turf grasses come in three different growth habits -- clumpers, rhizomatous and stoloniferous -- and most common lawn blends, both warm and cool season grasses, combine a variety of both. Bentgrass, Kentucky blue and creeping ryegrass -- all of which are common to various cool season grass mixtures -- are either rhizomatous or stoloniferous and can create rooting, weedy problems when applied as a mulch to a planting bed. There are a number of other various grass species as well that will create similar issues. Bermuda and Zoisya grass are well known for this problem as well and they tend to be used most often in warmer climates (warm season grasses) and often as a single species rather than as part of a blend of various turf grasses.

Although putting straw around the plants worked in my head... in reality... a little less on the "working" part. This weekend I started a new vegetable bed to put in six extra bush tomato plants and four pole beans my son brought from kindergarten as a project. The bed is 7' long and 2' wide, next to a 4' tall chain link fence. I de-sodded, spaded it up, forked it, worked in five gallons of unfinished compost (my compost isn't quite done, but it was all I had), raked, and planted. There were lots of worms, so I figure the dirt is okay. There's also lots of weeds around it and the bed is out and kind of exposed and all new. I was concerned my six year old would be taken by a desire to use the fresh dirt as a derby site for his hot wheels and dump trucks. So I decided I'd experiment with it and see how the newspaper + mulch thing worked. I didn't have grass clippings and getting into the compost reminded me I was out of browns, so I bought a bale of oat straw at Bergmann's near Stillwater. I figured if it went badly, I'd use it in the compost. Well... I put newspaper around the plants, cutting 2"x2" holes for the plants to poke through. Then the straw. The plants are from 2 inches tall to 6 inches tall. The taller ones were fine, but the smaller ones were kind of swamped by the straw. At the end, it didn't really look like something that was going to work out. I guess I should have taken a picture and posted it. Any comments? Advice?