Unknown allium

What did I dig up? I'm puzzled...
This bed has been neglected and not harvested. There was garlic dumped there a couple years ago, I'd say elephant garlic also at some point. Also in there was a type of allium I have been seeding from here and there in the rental yard for several years, I have it labeled "some sort of wild onion" with my guess being a leek relative.

I'm digging the bed over (it's never been dug at all) adding leaves and kitchen scraps, and removing a lot of rocks, and breaking up the allium clumps and replanting them down in better soil. The garlic is definitely clumped as garlic, the big bulbs that clump like it definitely taste like elephant garlic. But the "some sort of wild onion" has me just flat baffled.

The clump it was in was all small round bulbs, from marble sized to 2 inches, I brought in the 2 inch one, and planted the rest back down. It is round, slightly pointed top, had purple paper skin, but inside was white with faint yellow streaks. And no layers like an onion, or segmentation at all. Texture like a new potato. I took a bite, mellow like elephant garlic, till it after burned bitter strong garlic.

What on EARTH did I dig up? Is there such thing as elephant garlic that grows as unsegmented balls?

Could it be a form of babbington leek? backyard lardersays there are similar forms that grow from seed. Alternatively sometimes garlic can grow single bulbs depending on growing conditions. I think this maybe to do with lack of winter chilling, but I may have made that up!

Definitely not a leek. That was just a random guess several years ago, without digging them up or anything.

I dug another section of the bed this morning. And found more. And got pictures this time.

They come in clumps, all round balls, snuggled up together, various sizes, including itty bitty bulblets of some sort, that are mixed in with the bigger ones.

Unknown allium

They are definitely round, no segmentation at all, with a pointy tip. The itty bitty ones are slightly flattened on one side. Scale for this picture is the biggest cleanest one in the middle is about 1.25 inches diameter. The itty bitty ones are pea sized or smaller.

Unknown allium

We ate that first one for dinner, cooked up nicely, tasted wonderful. A bit stronger than elephant garlic, no sharp flavor that I had noted when it was raw.

The tiny ones look like garlic bulbils that grow on top of the flower stalk of hard necked garlic. The marble sized ones look like first year garlic grown from bulbils. Put them back in the ground and next year you should get a full size bulb of garlic.

I have free seeded lots of garlic bulbils and they make a nice spring green garlic or you can just let them grow an extra year.

Elephant garlic, coming back from the corms rather than cloves.  The corms are the dime sized, hard, pointy brown offsets that the plant produces to lay dormant until after the main bulb dies.  They can take years for soil life to break down the hard shell, letting the embryo inside absorb water and start to grow.  The bigger ones in your picture are called rounds.  Basically they grew from the embryo that was from a corm but aren't yet old enough to split into cloves, so they form a round, single clove.  Hence the name round.  You can produce the same thing with garlic, garlic rounds, by planting bulbils from hardneck garlic scapes rather than cloves.  The first year they grow into rounds, then when they have enough energy in the second (or third season if conditions aren't favorable in the second season) they will form a bulb with cloves.

What part of the world are you from? In the Eastern US, we have a wild onion called Meadow Garlic because it tastes more like garlic than an onion. Tends to come up in summer. I don't really know what the bulbs look like, as I've never tried digging them up, but they're known for producing seeds that just look like little, tiny onions at the tips of their stalks, after the flowers die. You can use those seeds as a spice, but I'm trying to get a decent population growing before I try utilizing them as a food source.

Was able to find a picture of their bulbs.

Smith Daniel: COOL! Thank you, that fits everything I  have seen with those things. Thank you for the excellent explanation too!

D Tucholske: I think I have those too, something around here that's called wild garlic (alliums have no decent names,they are all either onion or garlic :P) and I spread them all over! I'm with you, I want them spread, not harvested yet.

The more alliums my world has, the happier I am!
:D