If they ever discover life on Mars, I would not be at all surprised if it turns out to be onion weed. That stuff is indestructible. However, I am not waking up my slumbering gardening blog to moan about onion weed. No, I have a completely different weed to moan about.
MAJOR EDIT: See the comments below, as it seems I have mis-identified this weed based on a mistake in a book that I relied on when I originally wrote this post in 2016. In my editing I am deleting quite a bit of content, but I do hope the new identification is useful to you. Thanks to Helensburgh Landcare for setting me straight.
Its common name is Phyllanthus tenellus. Here's a few photos of the evil weed in action.
This second snap is more like it. You rarely see one of these things on its own. Usually they come up in numbers, like this.
Fortunately, when small they are very easy to pull out of the ground. That isn't the problem — it's just the sheer numbers of them, everywhere.
