Egypt Onions

[JRYezierski]

What or when do you harvest /use the parts of Egypt Onions. The top mini bulbs before or after flowering? The stem as scallions? When do you use the main base/bulb? Feel pretty stupid asking having lived/worked in farming town all my live. Jerome

[Lorenzo L. Love]

I grow the very similar Catawissa onions. For people unfamiliar with these, they are perennial onions with a small bottom bulb that produce a very tall stalk that bears a cluster of smaller bulblets. The old world native Egyptian onion are also called top onions, tree onions or walking onions. The new world native Catawissa onion is a little taller and a little more cold hardy and it's bulblets sometimes produce stalks topped by another cluster of bulblet while still on the mother plant.

You can propagate them by either dividing and replanting the clumps of bottom bulbs or more easily by planting the bulblets.

The top bulblets can be used anytime after they get big enough to be worth peeling. About hazelnut size is as big as they get. Not good keepers, plan on using or planting them within a few months of the mother plant dying back. They are mild and good tasting raw or cooked but a real bitch to peel.

The bottom bulbs are very strong, way too strong to use raw. Okay fully cooked at about one quarter the amount of regular globe onions. You can use them anytime but usually you should wait until the plant goes dormant in the fall so you don't lose the top bulblets. They don't keep well once pulled so leave them in the ground and pull them as needed. They are very cold hardy and I've chipped them out of frozen ground to use.

The shoots from the mature bottom bulbs tend to be too strong for scallions but the bulblets produce excellent scallions. Plant the top bulblets in the early fall to get good cold hardy scallions all winter and into the next early spring. Plant more bulblets in the early spring to get a second late spring crop. Don't let them get too big or they get strong too.

Lorenzo L. Love

you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.? Cicero

[Pen]

Scallions in spring. Take the mini bulbs for pearl onions whenever they're big enough. I've never used the main base. Is there a bulb at the base? Silly me, I've been growing these for 10 years and I've never checked. ;)