Onion sets

A few of my onion sets have sent up flower stalks. Should I pull them now for green onions, or will the bulbs continue to grow? (I know they won't keep if I harvest them in the fall)

Next year I'll sort them by size before planting, and only plant the tiny ones shallow in a row for big onions, and plant the bigger ones deep and in a bunch for green onions.

I know seeds is the way to grow big onions, but I haven't had much luck with that -- except one year when I planted leeks...

Bob

Reply to
zxcvbob
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I'd pull the ones with flower stalks for green onions while the stalks are still tender.

Onion seed needs to be very fresh for good germination.

Seedling onions transplant pretty easily, so can be started in pots. Wash the potting soil off the roots and tease the plants apart, but don't get too paranoid about saving all the roots. The little onions are pretty tough. (It helps keep things managable if you trim the tops back a bit a week or so before you intend to plant them out.)

Or, you can mail order bundles of onion seedlings. (This is what I do now, after years of starting them from seeds.)

Reply to
Pat Kiewicz

My wife lets some of the onions stay in the ground over the winter. We're in the Baltimore area so it does freeze around here, although not as severe as Michigan. She digs up the onions in the spring as needed for the table.

Paul

Reply to
Pavel314

Some of mine did, too, in the very early spring; well, late winter.... I think it's fairly commonplace.

Yes and yes. Regardless, you'll need to eat those first. DW&I ate'em straight from the garden.

Unless they're prepackaged, sort them when you buy them! I do that every year, looking for sets that just cover my l/h pinkie nail. I'm sure it distracts the nursery folks but it's my money and time. I've always read/heard that smaller sets produce larger bulbs. Dunno for sure; it's anecdotal but what-the-hell. For green onions, I succession-plant those little white spherical onions that are so ubiquitous on seed stands; I don't know what they're called. At any rate, I plant them really closely together in containers near other culinary herbs so that for most of the year (except for mid-July through mid-Sept) DW and other interested neighboring cooks have a ready supply of tender green shoots. I pull them ruthlessly as they mature in order to use the space for tender new ones.

Reply to
balvenieman

My grandmother used to have "multiplying onions" that never bloomed and never went dormant -- this was in Houston, Texas. They looked like scallions, but the taste was a little different. (I figured out later that they taste like shallots.) They just kept dividing like chives and the clump got bigger and bigger. You'd pull up a clump, and break one off and replant it.

I've tried planting shallots and using them green. They taste right, but they don't endlessly multiply. I wonder if day length has anything to do with it? In Houston, the days never get much longer than 14 hours, and up here they get well over 16 hrs long. Maybe what she had was a long-day variety of "potato onion", or a confused shallot.

Bob

Reply to
zxcvbob

If you want to see a strange onion, do a Google image search on "Egyptian Walking Onion." We had some in the garden a couple of years ago.

Paul

Reply to
Pavel314

Yep, I've seen those. They're not what I'm looking for. Since posting previously, I figured out that what Grandma had was probably a shallot variety called "Louisiana Evergreen." (no idea if they'll grow up here where the days are too long and the winters are too cold)

Bob

Reply to
zxcvbob

Had some Egyptian Walking Onions for a while too. I saw some garlics on TV the other night that appeared to have cloves at the top of the stalk too. Not sure what they were. But the EW Onions you mention were very strong, I mean tasting onions for days strong, so we didn't use them much. When I think of shallots, I think of mild, not overpowering onions.

Reply to
Wilson

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